Power and Monopoly
Thank You Leena Ma’am for giving such an insightful talk on “Stimulus JS — Sprinkle JS on HTML”. I loved your talk on how Stimulus JS can be used to easily included in HTML and making development faster.
Thank you for the talk showing that there are other simple and powerful options beyond the known players like ReactJS, Angular or VueJS. It was insightful.
I knew that ReactJS was overkill for me. But never realised I had other options. Thank you for making me realise the same.
The above are a few feedback I got after my talk @ JSFoo about Stimulus JS. Stimulus helps to sprinkle Javascript in your HTML. That is the only thing Stimulus does — nothing more, nothing less. And Stimulus does a fabulous job solving that one problem.
Originated at Basecamp, and now open-sourced, the focus for Stimulus was to provide the experience of Single Page Javascript applications to Server-side rendered HTML pages. I hope the community continues to keep the focus on the same instead of switching to solve too many problems.
As engineers, even though our primary focus is solving problems, we make mistakes while choosing the wrong tools to solve problems. We’ve seen issues with vendor lock-in, especially with enterprise software.
And the solution to that was to go with Open Source. But with Open Source too, we make wrong choices by going with the agenda — if you have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.
In the podcast Open Source and Power, Matt Mullenweg and David Heinemeier Hansson debate about tech monopolies, power in open-source communities, and how to be good stewards of the modern web.
The trigger for the podcast was a tweet from Matt about Wordpress capturing 85% of the market share.
DHH refers to Shopify in the podcast as someone can build a valuable business without capturing the market. They’ve built a whatever, $30, $40 billion business off 1%. That, to me is a beautiful expression of capitalism actually working. I am not getting into capitalism here. The emphasis on building something sustainable without dominating made me think.
When we are building something, the focus should only be adding value and sustainability of the business. And when we are taking a solution, we don’t need to go with something that has the highest market share. The focus should be what tools help us to solve the problem sustainably.
