Bonus: htmx and gatekeeping
So I want to talk a little bit about the concept of gatekeeping in tech, and that can sort of mean different things to different people. But for me, I've realized it's kind of been the inspiration, for why I am so excited about HTMX. And, you know, I've never done a podcast before, but I'm now setting up, you know, this podcast, but also, an h tmx example page. And it really goes back to this this concept of gatekeeping. And I'll tell a quick story.
Lazarus:I was a computer science major and, in college and in the either the end of the 1st year or the beginning of the 2nd year, there was a class, it was the assembly language, and the assembly language's professor felt like it was his job to weed people out of the comp sci major, to find the people who were, you know, couldn't hack it, too weak. So he made sure that he let people know his class was extra hard. He thought he was doing a favor to see how serious everybody was. And he was proud that he would tell at the beginning of the year, you know, a bunch of you are not going to make it, some of you were going to drop out of the computer science major altogether. He failed a lot of people, and he was proud that he failed a lot of people.
Lazarus:And he shouldn't have been proud of that. He was a bad teacher. He was not good at teaching. He took people who were at the start of their journey learning computer science, learning how to program, and he made them feel dumb because they couldn't figure out this kind of arcane stuff, or they felt like they couldn't figure it out. He was also a bad teacher.
Lazarus:He actually like, a good teacher inspires people to learn something even though it's hard, and he did the opposite. He made them feel like they were already dumb and they couldn't do this. And we all know these people in tech. They're they like to sort of get into the nitty gritty, and they like to memorize things, and they and that's fine. There are people out there who are very good at memorizing things, and can remember all these kind of arcane stuff, and they like to sort of show it, and it's easy for them.
Lazarus:That's fine. There's plenty of brains like that, but those are not the only brains that should be in programming. It's a disservice to the whole industry, the way that that happened. I remember it in college. I remember seeing people drop out of the computer science major, especially women and especially people who were just kind of starting.
Lazarus:People who didn't they didn't have 15 years programming at home as kids in their back pocket. They were wanting to learn, they wanted to learn the stuff, and he was this gatekeeper. And it was worse than just that one class, he really made people drop out forever, and they thought they couldn't do it, and they started to internalize that. And then the ones that were left, the people who survived the class, they would internalize that mentality also. They thought that they were the ones who could hack it.
Lazarus:They were the ones who should be there. They were the ones that belonged, and that class was for a certain type of person. Some people loved it, because, you know, you get into the nitty gritty, you have to implement, you have to implement multiplication and division at the at the computer chip level. And that appeals to a certain type of nerd. But that's not the only type of person who should be in the programming world.
Lazarus:Okay. So that's kind of a long story about, you know, what gatekeeping is to me, but you see it everywhere. You see it with, the text specs on, you know, when you sort of go into a new library or a new framework, and you see people talking about it, and they it's like you have to know this this this and this and this, and you have to know this and what, you don't know that, and there's just there's a certain mentality, of this sort of gatekeeper idea that keeps people out, and the gatekeepers, they're fine with that. They don't want everyone there. They are the best at this and they want to make sure that people know.
Lazarus:So I think of h tmx as the anti gatekeeper. You don't need to know anything else. You need to know, you know, HTML is and some some basic web principles. It works with any other tool. So if you have your own back end knowledge, if all you know is HTML, you can still use it.
Lazarus:You just include it at the top, and then you start using it. You just start using the examples. You don't need to know rails or Laravel. It's great if you do. That's fine.
Lazarus:If you know react, if you know all these things, that's fine. You can know that too and still use h tmx, still get the same benefits from it. You know, the the creator of it has this kind of it's like a meme, but, you know, h t m x is a library of peace, you know, whenever people are fighting over this and that, what's better, what's better. And, you know, it's a good it's a good meme, but it's also a technical truth. It plays along with everything else.
Lazarus:So you can come to h t m x with any level of knowledge, and it's just baked in. It's you're already gonna be able to use it. You don't have to use the build process. The build process is a gate in and of itself. If you're using NPM, and you have to set up a node server just to get started on your home computer, That's a gate, and it's this is not malicious.
Lazarus:People are not trying to do this out of, you know, some people are, but most people are not trying to do this out of any malicious reasons. They just these things build up over time, and all this complexity is a gate, and sometimes it's perceived complexity. You know, I think one of the things that htmx is doing is stripping away that perceived complexity. People think it's impossible to do things like, you know, send a request to the server and get stuff back, and it that is not complex. Theoretically, it you know, there's nothing in there that is actually difficult to understand, that's actually difficult to implement.
Lazarus:If you try to explain what's happening in a React app when you're clicking on stuff and when requests are being sent around and when authentication is happening, This is a nightmare and that is like this complexity created by design and h tmx just is stripping that all away. So I think maybe it's gonna make some people upset to not have those types of gates anymore. I don't know. Because if you don't have those gates and everything is just easy to do, the gatekeepers aren't exactly needed. I don't think they would like that so I would expect some backlash, you know, to to some of that.
Lazarus:But my hope and what I sort of see happening is I think it can open up a whole new world of developers who would otherwise try to get started and just get too overwhelmed. And I think this is gonna open up development and building incredible useful products to a lot more people. So that's sort of that's why I think this is so exciting. I think it's a it's a super cool community, and I think just the ethos, the actual technical qual the technical specs of the library make this ethos possible, that developers from all backgrounds, all walks of life, can build these incredible products and can get their ideas out there without going through these type of gates, without having to deal with the gatekeepers.
