We do what we must because we can

Yes, I'm still alive, just very busy with lots of exciting worky things, including my CMS. Yes, that one. And although this will be something like the 5th version that will make it into production, it will be the first version I'll release under an open source license. At last.

The irony is that although my feature list grows and my available time shrinks, with the server-side and client-side frameworks and tools that have been released over the past few years, it has actually become a lot easier to accomplish what I want. But with so much already written by other people, I'm often finding no practical alternative to stitching together popular open source components, and often even the work there has been done before. I can't find a good enough reason to reinvent the wheel - even though the wheels I've got are a bit lumpy, the amount of time and effort it would take to build new ones from scratch is impossible to accept as a realistic alternative.

I can't help feeling that this increasing dependence on complex frameworks and out-of-the-box components risks pushing us towards a homogenised web, with the only real choice for developers being between a handful of existing projects. And if that is the case, although it may help us now, I'm not sure it's a good thing for the long-term health of the industry.

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