And so the rhythm of web work, the not-unpleasant repetition of edit-refresh, has changed. Now it’s edit-refresh-refresh-refresh. And with all those refreshes, you’re not just making sure your one single glorious layout looks right; no, that would still be tractable on a rainy day. Instead, you’re making sure the bizarro variant layouts you’ve cooked up for phones and tablets all look right, all unfurl themselves properly from within the same source somehow, the source that started out so simple, so elegant, but now it’s mutated, it’s full of special cases, because if the sidebar moves up to the top of the phone’s little screen, the buttons are going to have to line up in a row, but there isn’t room for all of them, and it’s not really even a sidebar anymore, is it…

Great observations about the web and web development by the fantastic Robin Sloan maker of Fish and writer of Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore.