Christian Heilmann

Web development is like assembling IKEA furniture

Friday, July 1st, 2022 at 12:06 pm

IKEA instruction style illustration showing a person trying to assemble CSS, HTML and JavaScript and calling MDN for help

I’m currently putting things together for a new flat and I realised that there are a lot of similarities between assembling IKEA furniture and doing web development.

  • You get a huge bag of seemingly random parts and you should sort them before you start
  • Everything is standardised and uses building blocks
  • The manual is meant to be universally understandable and such needs some effort to grasp
  • Forcing something to fit means you’re doing it wrong
  • Leftover items mean you skipped a step
  • You can use power tools to speed things up but you are likely to break things if you do
  • Plan to assemble it right the first time, because taking it apart will mean you break it.
  • Some parts are impossible to put together on your own – partner with another person and get a second pair of eyes to prevent you from doing something stupid
  • Things look small and easy to handle when flat packed, but once you assembled them they take up a lot more space and are harder to move elsewhere

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