Web development is like assembling IKEA furniture

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