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30 Nov 2015 · by David DeSandro

Metafizzy is five years old. That's old. Old enough that it was past-due time to do an an overhaul: brand new site, brand new brand.

You would think, after all this time, I would finally have it figured out. I know I want to keep working on Metafizzy. I feel better doing this job than any other job I've had before. But I'm not certain what's next.

Five years for a business is no small feat. But when I put it in those terms, five years, there's something underwhelming about it. Metafizzy is still just me, working on my own projects. Shouldn't I be managing a team of people? Shouldn't there be more products? How come everything feels just as small as when I started?

I don't have answers just yet, but I'm now thinking about these things. Hitting one milestone gets you thinking about the next milestone. It's a bigger timescale.

The weird thing is, what I do — front-end development — feels even more niche than when Metafizzy first started. Front-end widgets have been dropped for new shiny things: frameworks and build tools. But front-end UI libraries were never "solved." The same issues that widgets faced five years ago are still prevalent today: inconsistent APIs, poor documentation, lack of standards, and so on. On top of that, UI libraries have to fight to support the multitudes of frameworks, package managers, and build tools. Wasn't it supposed to be better by now?

So the good news is there's plenty of work to be done.

I don't know what the next five years holds. Will a kid getting her first smart phone today even use websites five years from now? Maybe everything will run in Minecraft. But, if anything, the years have taught me that there's always more time to solve the problems you have today.

Our story thus far...