When you put together IKEA furniture, it feels a lot like 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
Top comments (3)
It's a good analogy.
But for some things there are so many ways to do them. There are parts that you can put in one way or the other. One is inteded by the makers. The other works but looks crappy.
For IKEA only one side of the part has color. So it fits but it looks crappy.
For WebDevelopment there are so many ways you can execute a JS function when you click a button. It is hard to tell which is the "best practice" by looking at the API.
I wish there was something like a strict type definition for Browser APIs. Which disallows
element.onlickbecause there iselement.addEventListener.Web Development with Frameworks and Libraries is like assembling IKEA might be a better title.
I disagree. HTML to me is components. Using frameworks and libraries is the point of using power tools where an Allan key is enough.