Developer obsession and why we have so many tools

I’ve been up for about over 40 hours now and had some very productive hours of work behind me. You know the feeling when you are satisfied with what you’ve done.

I love coding and building products. With that of course come the curiosity to see if we/I could leverage something new or if there are better tools available.

With that in mind, I’ve revisited webpack again. So much so that I’ve spent over 16 hours building a whole application, or better said, adding webpack to our application. The result? I scraped it all.

While I love the concept and the power of the tool. I just can’t see myself being forced into the battle of export and import that webpack forces upon you. Not only that, but trivial functions need to be exported and given a specific namespace in webpack.

To visualize this further, you sometimes have to create a proxy file that imports the exports from your original class just to create an export so it can be used as an import in the base file. Are you still with me?

This was also the point where I’ve asked myself (again) “why am I doing this to myself?” and “why do developers always need to make certain things complicated?”

Making hard things look (or code) easy is the really hard work. That’s where a developer can show his real value. How does creating more paths (functions) help me manage my code better? I just added more to take care off and also added a new layer of complexion to my code base.

This is not specifically regarding webpack, it’s the general mentality of (certain) developers that only feel validated when they can change an existing system. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for innovation and iteration and I’ve done my fair share of that. However, in my mind, true innovation is in simplicity.