I like to be up to date on the latest tech trends, and I read a lot of online tech publications. I post many of the interesting articles I find to my linkblog every day. Some of these trends start to become a bit buzzwordy, like artificial intelligence (AI), augmented reality (AR), blockchain and autonomous vehicles. All these technologies are everywhere these days, and they are great, but I realised today that I’m happy just building websites and workflows. When it comes down to it, that’s what I do.

The world of websites is massive, with different approaches necessary for both client-side and server-side code. What I love is that both in their own way require creative ways of solving problems. It’s incredible to me how much progress has been made in just the past decade on both sides of web development. New frameworks, libraries, cloud infrastructure, architectures, design patterns, tooling, governance models. It’s amazing.

And workflows have become so central to what and how we do things in a digital world that we hardly notice them anymore. It’s a very broad category, sometimes it’s just called automation, but the essence is the same, analysing how we are doing things, then streamlining and in some cases creating entirely new processes by stitching together a variety of off-the-shelf and custom software. Whether it’s file based media production, extract-transform-load (ETL) pipelines, continuous integration & continuous delivery (CI/CD) build systems, or infrastructure provisioning systems, there’s an enormous variety.

The boundary between the two disciplines is fuzzy, with quite a lot of cross-over, and new trends like the Jamstack and static site generators, because you can build websites using workflows! The boundary is an interesting place to be.

It’s totally possible that I might get involved in some of the buzzwordy trends in the future, but I’m happy creating efficiency, stability, robustness, and growth through technology by building websites and workflows.

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@markjgsmith

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Originally posted on blog.markjgsmith.com