Yesterday I was invited by CleverTap to speak at their CleverTalks event. I chose to spoke about the history of web development and how the most exciting languages right now are, wait for it, HTML and CSS, and how these two, coupled with new approaches like HotWire, LiveView and HTMX can save us from the complexity of SPA frameworks, while still allowing us to build reactive and 'rich' web applications.

I am very excited about these old and boring technologies and one has to commend the browser vendores for seriously pushing to make these platforms so much easier to build on. Some of the cool stuff that I find many web developers are unaware of are

  • ViewTransitions - build buttery smooth transitions between elements and pages without JS
  • the `dialog` element lets you build modals with a much nicer API and takes away a lot of the fiddly bits associated with hand rolling modals
  • the Shadow Dom and HTML Template elements allow you to quickly insert elements into the real DOM
  • HTML Form validations are surprisingly powerful and when coupled with CSS can make your validations purely declarative and without any JS
  • CSS nesting means you can drop your SASS/SCSS precompilation steps
  • New :has, :is and :not selectors make CSS way more powerful.
  • don't even get me started on the criminal underuse of HTML5 data-* attributes to maintain application state in the markup.

Making UIs purely declarative using core browser APIs will leave us free to deal with the complexities of the application rather than struggle with an ever changing landscape of JS SPA frameworks. Or at least that's how I see it and I like it. Your tastes may, of course, differ :-)

Here's the link to the whole presentation. I think a video may come out later that makes the slides more comprehensible.


On to the jobs yes?

This week we have two new jobs from Richpanel. Richpanel are building in the huge customer support space and they have a remarkable product that is gaining a lot of customer love. But the product itself needs some love. It has grown and changed a lot in the quest for PMF and now needs some senior frontend and backend talent to stabilise the code and improve performance so that the company can scale customer acquisition. Richpanel pays well and has the most amazing office in Bangalore. Rare to see a company take so much pain to provide a good working environment, in these days of WeWork and plug-and-play offices.

Also wanted to highlight the challenging role at Druva for a principal engineer. If you know any senior (12+ YoE) distributed system and filesystem mavens, please do point them towards the role. I'm offering a 2% referral bounty on this role, so there's something in it for you as well.