Viewing a technology as a purely neutral object is ignoring the human intention designed into it, the meaning that humans give to the technology we interact with, and the incredible agency involved in a technologist’s work.
You can see this everywhere if you look. For example, you’ve probably had the experience of doing something for the first time, maybe growing vegetables or using a Haskell package for the first time, and being frustrated by how many annoying snags there were. Then you got more practice and then you told yourself ‘man, it was so simple all along, I... See more
Away with the tools for developers! Let’s bring back the weirdness and experimentation and the joy of building a website again! Give us software to peel back all the layers of HTML and CSS and customize them, remix them, riff on code that we barely understand.
But regardless of missing features, the biggest disappointment of all developer tools in every browser is the unanswered question that lies at the very heart of them all: what about the fun? Because today I see DevTools as merely a command line for the web (the web developers won whilst the cypher punks and the dark web hacker dweebs lost). There’s... See more