A talk given at PyCon Argentina and PyCon Brazil, 2009.

Web development sucks.

It’s true: web development, at its worst, is difficult, repetitive, and boring. The tools we have suck. At best, they make web development slightly less painful, but we’re a long way from making web development awesome.

The history of web development tools is a history of trying to solve this problem. It’s a history of asking, “how can we make this suck less?” It’s important to understand this history, because we can look at past trends and use them to predict the future.

I’ve got a couple of sweet upcoming speaking/teaching gigs coming up, and now I’m going to pimp them out. If you’re not down with self-promotion, you should read no further.

February 22-23 I’ll be speaking at Journalism 3G, a symposium on technology and journalism at Georgia Tech. I’ll be part of a roadmaps session wherein I get to pontificate about the future of journalism and the cool tech on the horizon. The rest of the program looks really exciting – I’m looking forward to it.