I don’t want to be a star developer. If you’re like me, you want to get good at something (develop a craft), you want to work with interesting people, you want to make sure you make a living for your family, and you want to make a difference for people.
For me, I’ve phrased it this way: I want to craft products with mature colleagues and sell to happy and intentional customers.
JavaScript ends up being something that I use to build that future. But it also means that I’ve got to write words to be understood, be kind and generous, be attentive and investigative, go deep rather than quick, think more, care more, and choose when to be more vulnerable.
The fat JavaScript stacks-du-jour have a lot of appeal. They promise you to be able to do more with less. But what if I want to do less?
Optimizing developer productivity is akin to taking the same car to the corner store, to a ride downtown, or to the next city. Sometimes I instead want to walk to the corner store, ride a bus downtown, hop on a docked bike for a while and take a train to the next city.
Past a certain point, developer productivity becomes a vain pursuit, because you’re not just a developer. You have multiple facets, and they don’t have to pull in different directions.
Live an interesting life, and bring what you learn about life into your JavaScript project.