A short personal reflection on 20 years spent in the website development industry.
On a Mission
I joined xfive (at that time, XHTMLized) in summer 2006. Back then, I was running a small business called Handmade Websites. I was tired of chasing my own clients, so I welcomed an opportunity to focus on development.
It was the time of web standards, Jeffrey Zeldman, and fighting with Internet Explorer. It wasn't only about making money.
We felt like we were on a mission. A mission to make the web better for users and developers.
Digging Our Own Grave?
Ironically, in retrospect it seems like we were digging our own grave for the last two decades. Deploying thousands of projects, millions of lines of code. Open source projects like Chisel. Dozens of technical articles about CSS, WordPress, and other topics. xfive and other companies were creating training material for future LLMs.
Now these AI models fire back, increasing capacity and decreasing demand, making web development a tough space to operate in. But at least we can use LLMs without hard moral dilemmas, since they are a product of our own work.
Closing the Circle
After years spent in marketing, I'm partially moving back to a development role. This shift began two years ago when I started working on our company website in Webflow.
Except for the recent turmoil, I like Webflow as a tool. It doesn't isolate you from HTML and CSS, but makes managing the underlying codebase easier.
I'm happy with how we solved alignment between our Figma design system and the Client-First library in Webflow. Keep the naming conventions the same, and you don't have to measure anything, just pick the appropriate classes. Pixel perfect and less prone to error.
This reminds me of the old days, when we followed the KISS principle and looked for simple, elegant solutions. Nowadays AI can solve problems with brute force, but lacks the elegance and simplicity of human problem solving.
So the demand for human skill might not be over yet.
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