The small web is beautiful
Summary: I believe that small websites are compelling aesthetically, but are also important to help us resist selling our souls to large tech companies. In this essay I present a vision for the “small web” as well as the small software and architectures that power it. Also, a bonus rant about microservices.
About fifteen years ago, I read E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful and, despite not being interested in economics, I was moved by its message. Perhaps even more, I loved the terse poetry of the book’s title – it resonated with my frugal upbringing and my own aesthetic.
I think it’s time for a version of that book about technology, with a chapter on web development: The Small Web is Beautiful: A Study of Web Development as if People Mattered. Until someone writes that, this essay will have to do.
There are two aspects of this: first, small teams and companies. I’m not going to talk much about that here, but Basecamp and many others have. What I’m going to focus on in this essay is small websites and architectures.
