I have been into web development and web design since 1999. Since then, many things have changed. Some for better, some for worse.
My first contact with this creative world was my wish to create a car catalogue and I did it, but since my knowledge of web technologies in that moment was limited to HTML and some CSS, the project ended up as good-looking website with more than 2.500 static web pages. Horrible, but nevertheless I had that satisfaction that I managed to do it and I got some rewards for it as well. It helped me to learn how to be smarter for the projects that were ahead of me.
As a child, I have been creating and recreating a LEGO city of four square meters and I was very good at it. My toy cars were perfect in shape and color, my houses were each very well designed and my whole city looked as if it was planed by an expert for urban development. When I started with web design, I guess I have found exactly that kind of fun and love for details in it and that kept me creating new web projects whole my life. I am one of those few who can say that I do what I like and love.
Tableless web design was the main issue some twenty years ago. Since 1999 web design and web development have evolved, but sometimes also devolved. I have never jumped in the first row to embrace every new trend or a general internet opinion about web design right after it appeared. There are still things that are being emphasized like some time ago so called "tableless web design", and we could talk about the reason behind it. It was nothing less but a heresy to use a table in HTML, until someone smart simply continued to use a table for what it has been made for - to show tabular data. And the world did not come to an end.
Today we have this front-end rendered mania in front of us. The general idea is for sure cool: one divides front-end development from back-end, uses something like Angular, React or Vue to call APIs, which are sending some JSON objects and we "just" put it into the layout of the web site. So where is the problem? Well, the problem is that not everyone is going to have millions of users that can not live with back-end rendering, not everyone are using large teams to produce one web site, and at the end, rarely is someone as good as Google to create a good front-end rendered web site.
What I today mostly see is an endless see of badly developed modern web sites, that load in an unpredictable, user unfriendly and slow way, and instead of getting more speed for the user, today's modern web sites seem to be built to pass speed tests for loading, and what comes after the first view, and if the user will be annoyed by constant appearing of additional content or not to mention absolutely annoying scrolling manipulation, that is not a problem of the development, isn't it?
Or how about how allmighty responsive web design looks like mostly today? Mobile-first, they say. Respect every device, they say. Yet what I mostly see is again an endless see of wordpress-based web sites with 100% div after div layout, with oversized photos for desktops, with scroll manipulation that makes the mouse very hard to use. Is that advancement? Is that respecting every device? I think not.
What to say about number of technologies that some people today use to build a simple web site? I miss internet that was made of simple HTMLs made by everyone. I miss the time when the internet was truly a place of freedom. You think that a page of Facebook or any other web service is yours? Think again!
Only your own website made by your own content is truly something yours and a simple user can not first learn PHP, Symfony, SQL, Doctrine, HTML, CSS, Twig, JavaScript, TypeScript, Angular (in all of its versions), Less, Sass, Node, npm, Bower, Composer, Grunt, Gulp and who knows what else tomorrow, to build a web site. I personally do not care, because I will manage in any technology stack and I will build the website if I want to, but has web design really gained by adding all these layers in the development? What about bugs, has there ever been more bugs than today? Didn't you already notice, the bigger the company behind the web site, the slower, more laggy and with more bugs the website?
I have always respected the KISS principle and if today's typical web solution is not the best example of over-engineering, I really do not know was it.
I respect those who make web sites for the human being, not for crowlers or speed tests. I respect reliability above anything else, precision and good content. I respect when your programmer does not work as a temporary designer and produces ugly UI. I respect when you really respect every device, not only the mobile phone.
At the end, we can all have some personal opinion about the web development, but what really matters is to show what you have done, how it looks and how it works.
Most of my career I have been working as a CTO, but there was not a single day, that I was also not developing and contributing to the projects in that way. Experience taught me that colleagues developers, especially seniors will never respect and follow someone who does not understand how tricky programming always is. Besides, I like to keep my memory fresh, when it comes to pure coding.
Here is a short overview of some key features of the projects I have been working on: