The more I know, the less I want to build. Which seems a bit ironic, considering how much I’ve already built.
Especially in recent years, I’ve found myself learning more and more about something, be it security or accessibility or compliance. Armed with that new knowledge, I’d finally reach a point to put it into practice … and falter.
I distinctly remember stumbling on a Hacker News post while researching for my generalised synchronisation protocol. It talked about all the liabilities of hosting user-generated content, even fully encrypted. The gist of it was, don’t do it. And it sucked all my motivation right out of me for a few days.
The other night, I was working on a smart input field, not quite a rich text editor, but something that allows for smart replacements, wrapping text and such. Things were going well, the features were all in … until I (re-)discovered that programmatically changing the value of an <input> or <textarea> element breaks the native browser undo/redo functionality. It’s just one of those little things you don’t think about unless you stumble across them.
Of course there are ways around that particular issue, but they all feel like progressively worse hacks. Currently, I’m thinking of building my own history system, since I’ll need that in other parts of the app as well. However, that also comes with so many issues, and I’m not quite sure what it’ll do to accessibility. Scratch that, I’ll use execCommand for the input for now. It’s deprecated, but less of a hassle.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m very happy to know more about accessibility than I did in my early days. I want my projects to be as accessible as possible. The more I learn about it, however, the more insurmountable the hurdles seem to become.
And some nights, I just don’t have the energy to tackle them any more. I used to be so excited about problems to solve, running ahead and finding wild and original solutions. Now I wonder about security and accessibility, compliance and maintainability. And perhaps, a tiny little bit, also if a chatbot would be better at it than me.
They are all important things to worry about (well maybe not that last one), but I miss the carefree days of just building something ignorantly. There was a certain innocence and lightness to that which I seem to have lost somewhere along the way.
It’s like growing up all over again. Suddenly, the world isn’t as simple as the eyes of a child made it seem, and it takes energy to fight through the paralysis that realisation brings. Energy I seem to have less and less of as I get older.
The only way forward is through, I guess. Because I don’t want to stop learning, and I certainly don’t want to stop building things.