The Web Developer Profile

Imagine you could write a library or service so useful that it helps thousands of developers each day. Think of the leverage this could bring when looking for a better paying gig, but most importantly, think of the warm fuzzy feeling you’ll get when seeing the envy in your peers’ eyes every single day.

Writing such a tool must be hard, right? You’d need to identify a really difficult problem, think long and hard on a solution, and then spend months coming up with a smart, efficient implementation. Well… this might be the case in other ecosystems, but we don’t dabble in reason and logic here in the web dev space.

We are innovators and visionaries, and we live and die by the words of our mentor - “move fast and break things”(Mark Zuckerberg). Of course, innovators that move fast don’t have time to waste on the mundane, and here is where opportunities lie.

Once you understand the mind of the web developer, you’ll come to realize that even selling him something as questionable as a 5 lines of code library is easily achievable.

The Web Dev Values: Efficiency

The average web developer is not concerned with trivial tasks like basic math for instance. His time and skills are too valuable, and he is held up in a SCRUM meeting anyway.

But he likes efficiency. He knows reinventing the wheel is nonoptimal and error prone, and he’ll be happy to always use a library instead of writing his own code. And he’ll do it every time, regardless of the complexity or lack of it. He’ll even do it if the only thing he needs to do is to check if a number can be divided by two.

And the guy who wrote the library checking if the number can be divided by two, will use in his implementation the result of the library checking if the number can’t be divided by two.

And that library has almost 500 000 weekly downloads, which coincidentally, is the exact number of Scrum ceremonies the web developer has to attend every single sprint

The Web Dev Values: Quality

The average web developer has a tremendous amount of knowledge and experience under his belt. He knows the importance of good quality software, of using design patterns, and most importantly, he knows that you are as good as the tools you are using. And, sadly, the web developer uses JavaScript.

JS is the modern Pandora’s Box so the web developer has to wonder what exactly is this number we are dividing by two.

So, again, the 10 lines library is-odd library used by the 5 lines is-even library has to use this 5 lines is-number library which is downloaded 75 millions times every week, which coincidentally, is the exact number of JavaScript frameworks the web developer learned in the past month.

The Web Dev Values: Collaboration

If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together. The web developer has a superiority complex for all the right reasons. However, from time to time, he accepts the help of his peers, especially if he needs to fix some trivial stuff, and there is no library he can use.

So even on a 5 line codebase, you’ll have at least 2 collaborators, which coincidentally, is the exact number of years the web developer still has until he is fully replaced by AI.

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