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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159: AI pipelines, 10x faster TypeScript, How to interview How to use LLMs to help you write code and how much electricity does that use? Is your API secure? 10x faster TypeScript thanks to Go!
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157: CUDA in Python, Gemini Code Assist and back-dooring LLMs We met with a CUDA expert from NVIDIA about the future of hardware, we look at how AI fails and how to play pong on 140 browser tabs.
156: Enterprise dead, all about Bluesky and React moves on! Learn about Bluesky as a platform, how to build a React App and how to speed up SQL. And play an impossible game in the browser.

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