On Tooling

I hate the word tooling. Tooling is a word that has been coming up over and over again lately. Developers have started to open their eyes to the mess that exists currently. This has brought us to a world in which a new 1000 word think piece enters the world about tooling.

Each new think piece attempts to tell us that we’re all doing it wrong and that we should do something about it. This leads to more think pieces about the problems.

Developers are going to overcomplicate things. Knee jerk think pieces about this situation are just a symptom of the problem.

Most of the pieces focus on not using any tooling, which is fine by me. I long for the days when things were simpler and we just wrote HTML, CSS, and javascript.

As with anything in life, there is a time and place for everything. Some days, just putting a bunch of static stuff in a folder works. There are times when you need a little extra oomph and automation to be most productive.

Complaining about tooling without solutions just leads to more tooling. Abstracting everything into an application that requires 2 lines of code, and 30,000 dependencies.

Think pieces about development are quite pretentious. They act as if everyone’s code is shit because the choices made are not the choices of the author. As with anything, developers need to make choices that fit their specific context — not the context of someone writing a 1000 word opinion piece.