I did not realize it until it was too late, but somewhere in the 2010s, the web became thoroughly lame.

Everything got funneled into corporate walled gardens. Websites converged on the same frameworks and tech stacks. Apps looked like Stripe checkouts, communication looked like Slack, and software engineering was mostly the serious business of configuring Kubernetes manifests to move JSON from Postgres to a React table.

It appeared professional, scalable, and utterly dull. A natural reaction to the chaos that came before, perhaps, but, as is human nature, we overdid it. Though, recently the hive mind seems to have shifted. Just as an earlier wave brought new people into making blogs and websites, these days similar cohorts are making software with ferocious intensity. They are challenging many assumptions about how software gets built and what is worth building.

I can only guess why now, but the boring suspicion is that the infrastructure built during that dull period has finally made small experiments less of an ordeal. For years, making a simple Mac app to watch your GPU meant dealing with Xcode, setting up build targets, and reading old AppKit guides. If you wanted to sync clipboard state between two personal phones, you spent a weekend wrestling Android permissions if you were competent. I definitely wasn’t, and so back then it took me two months (and somehow three phones).

During this period, growing small and weird creations was challenging. Unless you were venture-backed, masochistic, or armed with a legitimate (and thus boring) reason, you’d be limited to your brief ration of quirkiness. But things are different these days.

Today, a lot of the plumbing is easier to use because we’ve converged on the boring bits. That leaves more attention for what you want to build on top. It helps that we also have hallucinogenic tech for the bits you don’t know. People are jumping into places they wouldn’t have touched with a long stick before. The result is more and more custom, quirky software showing up across the interwebs. When you remove enough of the friction and decision points, building something delightfully specific to yourself feels reasonable.

Of course, it’s not a free lunch. Easy doesn’t mean good, but it sure leaves room for the odd’uns.

It also helps that so much of the corporate web consists of algorithmic sludge and pure digital absurdity. This gives us plenty of reason to wander back out into the open and explore what are now labelled personal digital gardens. Even programming languages are back to being unapologetically weird.

I wasn’t around for the very early web, but I’ve been assured it was quirky enough to annoy the serious crowd. I did glimpse the next wave, and it was obvious that nobody quite knew what they were doing because there was so much new stuff to figure out. I see some of that feeling again now, as people build toys for the fun of it. I’ll take this weirdness every time, and I hope people make good use of this period, as others did before.