Keep It Simple, Silly

I was reading a blog post by the prolific Cassidy Williams posted on CSS Tricks. The post was about how you should, to the extent you can, keep your projects simple. Here's my favourite part of the article, emphasis copied as is in the original article:

Your websites start fast until you add too much to make them slow. Do you need any framework at all? Could you do what you want natively in the browser? Would doing it without a framework at all make your site lighter, or actually heavier in the long run as you create or optimize what others have already done?

There is a place for modern JavaScript frameworks in today's web development, especially when it comes to building interactive applications. But, I try to steer clear of frameworks and technologies unless I think they are going to bring value to the project on which I am working. This site only uses JavaScript for comments because my intent with this site is to mostly convey my thoughts in the form of plain text. Plain text doesn't require complex technologies to share on the web. Other applications do and that's where more complicated tools come into play.

I have found that choosing to keep the technologies I use simple has helped me learn more about the fundamentals of the technologies, methodologies, or practices that I am working with. For instance, I have learned a lot about semantic HTML and accessibility by writing plain HTML with CSS and learning what it can do. I am now taking that knowledge into more advanced applications whose needs are greater than plain HTML and CSS.

This post is not advice. Choose the right technology for the job. But, at least for me, Cassidy's words hold true, and I think it's something all web developers should keep in mind when building a project.