Ferrari vs Skoda Octavia
It’s no secret that developers love their tools. Everyone has a different work flow and developers love to optimise things. This behind the scenes tooling and ‘how’ stuff is made is often known as ‘developer experience’.
Developer Experience
If you as a developer are comfortable and have a good work flow you’re going to work faster. This is a good thing. What can happen though is that the tail wags the dog, the developer experience dictates how something is made – if only because the developer prefers it that way. This is not a good thing.
The most obvious example of this to me is JavaScript frameworks like react and the JAMStack.
The JAMStack
JAMStack stands for JavaScript, APIs, markup and it’s a way of building very fast sites. It’s also a very complicated way of building sites compared to say WordPress and much harder to edit pages with much more complex hosting involved. Yes, you can use a headless CMS (even WordPress) and plug it into react but it’s a lot more work than a regular website. So what are the gains?
The Jam stack and frameworks like react are now widely used to create websites. If we’re talking about some dashboard for an insurance portal, perfect. If we’re taking about a brochureware site – why on earth are you using react?
There are some exceptions to this. If you need a brochureware site and you want it super fast with no server stuff to mess with, and you only edit it once in a blue moon, then maybe react is the right for you. Chances are though you need it to be easily editable and you do not need that level of engineering.
Recently I’ve seen people marketing themselves as doing JAMStack as opposed to that ‘orrible WordPress and it’s soo much better because of x, y and z.
Not everyone wants a Ferrari
The thing is not everyone wants or needs a Ferrari. Some of us want a Skoda Octavia. Having a powerful engine, and an incredible top speed but only 2 seats and no boot space for the family shopping might be the exact opposite of what you want.
It boils down to the right tool for the job. If you aren’t hitting the race track then don’t let people talk you into building a website that is something that they want, not what you want.
WordPress isn’t a worse tool than React, it’s just not as sporty or fast. The fact is with the right tools and know how, you can make a very punchy WordPress site, that also has a rocking amount of cabin room and oodles of boot space.
I’ve laboured the car analogy as far as it will go, and you can probably tell that cars are not my thing (I drove a Skoda Roomster). The point is don’t be tempted by shiny objects, use the right tool the job.