I can’t remember the last time I had an email from Kirupa.com - i think it was probably a long, long time ago though.
This was a timely email, though, as I am currently enjoying probably my second existential work crisis in around seven years.
After losing a job of 12 years working with Flash in 2017 i found work with a small tech company and was lucky enough to get a shot at rebuilding the website, as a part of my role there. The cranky old site we used to have was 99% bootstrap 3.0, with a nasty bit of php hidden away in a subdir that ran - runs - the businesses whole customer grievance contact facility. I say runs because it’s still there, and no-one seems to want to touch it.
In any case, i rebuilt the site from nothing as a brand new bootstrap 4 animal, put the old subdomain to sleep, and redirected everything we wanted to the shiny new www.
Fast forward almost four years and with demands on time and mountains of work in other areas of the business, the poor (now probably middle aged) ‘new’ website has not been given all of the attention that it probably should have, and is behaving quite poorly in the eyes of today’s performance indicators - lighthouse, gtmetrix and platforms such as hubspot (although hubspot is very vague around what exactly the problems are). These problems manifest themselves in the from of issues such as TBT, reserving space with CSS, render blocking resources, and a myriad of other tech challenges that, to be honest, I do not believe that I have the know-how to address.
Moving forward, I find myself at a point where a small part of me thinks i should effectively start thinking about retiring this build as well, and strike out on some sort of learning path that would lead me to a leaner solution able to address all of these performance issues either out of the box, or with some serious elbow grease.
But i have no idea where to begin, to be honest. Which is why i thought i might post this.
As someone with training in older standards - markup, CSS and a tiny bit of JS - what would any of the folks out here say the next step (or the absolute must-knows) for someone like me might be?
Is there a framework - or frameworks - that I could invest time in learning that may offer a little bit more futureproofing against the march of time? Or at least which i could invest my time in now to address the performance shortfalls of my poor old bootstrap build as it currently stands?
I do understand that webdev is an ongoing and never ending process of learning - at this point, i feel as though I’m lost before i even begin, though, because i don’t understand where the starting point here would be.
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