Build It

After working on a five year old site last night I’m torn. I love the collection of build tools I’ve accumulated over the past few years. Gulp and grunt and composer and npm have just made everything so much more powerful. But they’re also destroying my ability to plan ahead.

The problem is simple. I got the files for that old site, swapped out an old class, edited a line of CSS and pushed it back up. Simple. I didn’t need to check versions or make changes because a library has updated. In contrast, I edited a larger site and spent more time fixing broken dependencies and trying to get grunt working than I did making the change itself.

Rapid development is brilliant. The ability to try new technologies and different ways of approaching a problem is one of the reasons the web is flourishing. But we’re losing sight of what happens six or twelve months from now, much less six years.

I don’t have the patience to port every new toolkit to every prior project, which leads to a trail of abandonware as often the developers of the tools themselves have found the same thing.

So for now, my own sites will remain just plain vanilla. But for the big jobs, there’s just no getting around the need for tooling and that makes me sad.