Gratified for @ben@werd.social’s essays on smart, low-cruft, standards-based web development of late. As a (former?) web developer I was both discouraged by the mountain of frameworks+related things that seemed to be the default starting point for projects I saw, and certain that while there are new things for me to learn, what I was seeing dominate was not the best. Ran into a former colleague who is a real pro still doing agency-based web development and he seemed to agree.