Everythings old is new?

I've spent the last year relearning the industry from scratch shout out to roadmap.sh Partly because the Marriott work settled into maintenance or maybe it was complacency, mostly because I looked up at some point and realized the web had changed shape while I was inside enterprise tools, and the measurement world I knew had been legislated into a different industry entirely.

the frameworks moved again, but this time backwards, in a good way

The new stack I've been learning barely resembles the SPA era I came up in. Astro ships plain HTML and hydrates almost nothing. Svelte compiles away instead of shipping a runtime. I also really love HTMX. The industry spent a decade putting JavaScript everywhere and is now spending this one taking it back out, and the sites feel like it, fast in the way the old server-rendered pages I once migrated away from were fast, except they're like actually good this time? There's a joke in here somewhere about my whole career being a loop: I rewrote JSP into React for a living, and the modern move is rendering HTML on the server again. The wheel turns. The people who understand why each turn happened are the useful ones.

the laws are the bigger story

The measurement side is unrecognizable, and not because of technology. Universal Analytics is dead, actually deleted, and GA4 replaced it with an event model that made every dashboard in the world need rebuilding. Consent Mode v2 became mandatory for anyone advertising into Europe in March of 2024, which quietly means the tags themselves now have legally significant behavior. The US states keep passing their own privacy laws, each slightly different, and the cookie banner went from an annoying UI element you closed as fast as possible to a load-bearing compliance mechanism that most sites haven't written correctly.

And they really are wired up wrong. Once I started looking I couldn't stop. Banners that record the choice and enforce nothing. Conversion tags firing on page load, counting every visitor as a lead. Consent frameworks installed next to tags that never heard of them. The gap between what sites claim they do and what their network tab shows is enormous, and almost nobody on either side, marketing or engineering, is positioned to see both halves. I've been the overlap guy since the dealer locator days. This is the same seat, except now the stakes include regulators.

so

So I'm building things again, my own this time. The details are for another entry, but the shape is exactly what my writing has been circling since 2018: sites built fast and plain, measured correctly, with the tracking treated as part of the product and the consent treated as part of the tracking. Telemetry first, it turns out, was never just a tutorial title. It's taken almost a decade to figure that out but here we are.

I got a new dog, her name is Millie. Shes just a baby!