I strongly believe anybody can do anything they want with their life. But there’s a big but. At some point you will start specializing in something. That’s normal and expected, it aligns with the rule about 10.000 hours required to master a skill, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell. 10.000 hours, roughly a decade once you account for actual hands-on time. Time is finite, so you’ll be able to specialize in, and become a grand master of, one or two, maybe three disciplines in a lifetime. Which one to pick? Anything you want.
The Japanese concept of “Ikigai” roughly translates to “reason for being”, and refers to something that gives a person a sense of purpose. It revolves around four main axes: what you love doing, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what you can get paid for. Whether you are lucky enough to check off all four, or settle for two or three, eventually you’ll find your purpose and reason, if nothing else to support yourself and your family. And again, it can be anything you want it to be.
In less philosophical or abstract terms, what you do is your core business, it’s what brings value to the world and what you’re paid for. And it’s the same for any person or company. There’s what brings value to the market, and everything else is distractions.
Developing your core business is constrained by the 10.000 hour rule, and distractions eat into that. Defining what is or isn’t a distraction is a bit harder. For example playing Zelda might not be a distraction if you’re a character designer/illustrator, but it generally is.
So is coding a web page a distraction for a product or graphic designer? Is it more like playing Zelda or more like learning an aspect of design? Again, hard to say, probably aspects of both.
But ultimately, the world is full of websites that clearly show how the coding was performed by someone who wasn’t experienced, or didn’t take the time to fully develop the craft. Someone who didn’t spend the 10.000 hours, didn’t become a web coding grand master.
For example one of our latest discoveries is that CSS optimizers such as mod_pagespeed or the one that’s built-in in Cloudflare will break code that relies on CSS variable declarations such as “0px”, by removing the “px” part. This is a correct optimization in other contexts but CSS variables, a relatively recent addition to CSS, are inconsistent in not equating “0” with “0px”, so the optimizers are buggy in stripping it. This might for example cause your website to work well on a testing server, and have some odd glitch when in production, or when you turn on a CDN.
There equally complicated and arcane examples, in how websites malfunction at certain browser window sizes, or malfunction in a specific browser, and it ultimately comes down to web coders’ inability to spend the time, to reach the “grand master status” and understand the problems, ironing out all the kinks, in all edge cases, in all browsers, accounting for all bugs.
And here’s the twist, even web coders working on a single website, design, or template, will have a time limit on the work they put in in a project, typing HTML, CSS and JS is an artisanal endeavor after all. Only the most successful/popular websites (or website templates) have the kind of user exposure that surfaces all the defects and minor edge cases, and that ultimately can justify a full time web coder (or team). For all others, the issues will live with the website forever, like say having some spacing or visual glitch on a specific smartphone, or not quite working with less known browser.
At some level of refinement it will end up not being justifiable time-wise even for the web coders, but that becomes much more realistic when the web coding is automated and heavily tested. For Sparkle we call that “Tuesday”.
Sparkle websites are deployed in the tens of thousands, all based on one common generation engine, and the websites are used by so many users and devices, all but the smallest issues are caught immediately, and with every version we refine and clean up the edge cases. Using Sparkle is like having a dedicated team of web coding grand masters, always ready for you.
When evaluating tools and technologies to build a website, consider how much low level HTML and CSS is put in your hands. It’s certainly true that the more you have, the more flexibility and power you have, but on the flip side, you also have the burden of needing to know what it does, and how to troubleshoot an issue when it comes up. There’s a place for complex web development tools, and it’s in the hands of people who do web coding as their core business. Sparkle’s goal is the opposite, it aims at giving you as much flexibility as possible, without the complexity. Everything you can touch in Sparkle is expected (and tested) to produce sensible results.
So there you have it. If your goal in life, your core business, the value you add to the world is coding, Sparkle is probably not the tool for you, but we fully embrace it, more power to you. If your Ikigai is not web coding, and building a website is a (necessary) distraction from what you do, Sparkle is the best tool for the job.
