Practice Progressive Enhancement.
Build first and foremost with forgiving technologies, declarative technologies, and forward and backward compatible coding techniques.
All content should be readable without scripting.
If it’s worth building on the web, it’s worth building it robustly, and building it to last.
Warm-blooded software:
Maybe your CI isn’t working because one of the services you depend on got bought or ran out of money. You add a new dependency and find yourself needing to upgrade your compiler. Another package you depend on is deprecated, and doesn’t work with the latest version of the compiler.
I aspire to build cold-blooded software:
You work alone, make some changes when you’re inspired, and then don’t touch it again for another year, or two, or three.
Rather than thinking, “how do I combine a bunch of disparate content, templates, and tooling into a functioning website?”, you might think “how do I start at a functioning website with content and then use templates and build tooling to enhance it?”
I think Jim is onto something here. The more dependencies you have in your build process, the likelier it is that over time one of them will become a single point of failure. A progressive enhancement approach to build tools means you’d still be able to launch your site (even if it’s not in its ideal state).
I want to be able to view, edit, and if need be ship a website, even if the build process fails. In essence, if the build does fail I can still take all the source files, put them on a server, and the website remains functional (however crude).
Progressive enhancement’s core value proposition, for me, is that HTML and CSS have features that are powerful in their own right. Using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript together makes for more reliable products than just using Javascript alone in a single-page-app.
This philosophy doesn’t apply to every website out there, but it sure as hell applies to a lot of them.