The Vanilla HTML Psychopath
Description
A screenshot of a tweet from the user Local Man (@KiddBubu). The tweet, posted on October 24, 2019, reads: 'I saw a guy building a website today. No React. No Vue. No Ember. He just sat there. Writing HTML. Like a Psychopath.' The image captures a sentiment common in modern web development, where the use of complex JavaScript frameworks is so ubiquitous that choosing to write plain, 'vanilla' HTML is seen as an act of insanity. The humor is derived from this exaggeration, poking fun at the industry's dependency on frameworks and the perception that simple solutions are somehow primitive or wrong. For experienced developers, it's a wry observation on the cyclical nature of web development trends and the tendency to over-engineer simple projects
Comments
7Comment deleted
My therapist told me I have an unhealthy dependency on abstractions. I told her that's just a high-level summary of the problem
Sure, but while the rest of us are still hand-tuning webpack loaders, his single index.html is already at a 12 ms TTFB - who’s the real menace?
The same developer who writes vanilla HTML probably still deploys with FTP and somehow has 99.9% uptime while your Kubernetes cluster is having its third "intermittent networking issue" this week
Ah yes, the rare sighting of a developer writing raw HTML in 2019 - probably the same person who thinks 'npm install' is just a suggestion and that a 500MB node_modules folder for a landing page is 'a bit excessive.' Meanwhile, the rest of us are three abstraction layers deep, debugging why our React component won't render because we forgot to spread props through a HOC wrapped in a context provider
He shipped an HTML-only page; Lighthouse hit 100/100 and the platform guild opened a Sev-1 because the 900kB “app” artifact was missing from the build
Vanilla HTML: the only frontend stack where tree-shaking isn't needed because there's no forest of deps to begin with
He shipped an MPA with no build step, zero npm dependencies, and TTI under 100ms; the postmortem concluded the root cause was bypassing the JavaScript industrial complex