Embracing Simplicity: MagnoliaConf 2025

Last week I was able to attend MagnoliaConf, formerly known as MagnoliaJS, a web conference that takes place here in my hometown of Jackson, MS. This was the first one held since 2023. In addition to hearing my brother speak again, there were several other good talks, and many of them seemed to have a theme in common: Embracing simplicity.

The following are some, but not all, of the talks that dealt with this theme that I found of particular interest.

The 4 Product Risks Developers Should Know

The first was “We Built It… and Nothing Happened: The 4 Product Risks Developers Should Know” by product coach Trevor Acy. Trevor’s presentation had a lot to do with pitfalls of the “waterfall” system of software development, in which you follow a series of steps over several months or a couple of years in order to release a product all at once. He says in this system, questions of viability, value, and usability are often simplified or overlooked. He discussed ways to test ideas and honestly evaluate the value of a product during the early phases.

Websites are different from other software products, but they share many of the same challenges. Indeed, websites are expected to do more and more things these days, not just sit there and be pretty. It’s possible to breeze through the initial work of conceptualizing and even designing much of the site while ignoring technical limits or usability issues that may become painfully evident at the end of the project.

Our steps for a new website project follow the general outline: Research, Architect, Design, Build, Test, Polish and Launch. At each of these steps, we have processes to address difficult questions and to allow for feedback from stakeholders and users. For example, the design phase always includes multiple reviews from the developers who will be working on the project. We get input from the client early on in the process to understand their most critical needs. Listening to Trevor’s talk, I was reminded of how important all these steps are.

Ship It First, Fix It Later

Another interesting presentation was “Ship It First, Fix It Later: Problem-Solving with Vanilla JS” by Roxy Rodriguez-Becker. She built a g-tube feed rate calculator for her young son who had several medical cnmplications, and it went viral. Her story really inspired me to believe you can build something simple at first and go from there. It’s more important to get real feedback from users than to try to build the perfect product all at once.

No build tool? No problem!

My brother Blake Watson’s talk was “No build tool? No problem!,” a guide to using the latest and greatest JavaScript and CSS without relying on a build tool. In some ways, his talk was born out of several conversations he and I have had over the past year about how we have grown to hate using npm, the most popular package management tool for JavaScript.

Most of the websites I’ve worked on as a professional developer have relied on compiling source code files into CSS and JavaScript that can be read by the browser. This provides us developers with certain niceties that don’t come out of the box with these languages.

However, it can be very difficult to maintain the build scripts, the gulp files, the webpack configurations, etc., etc. (If you know, you know; if not, then be glad.) Blake investigated many ways to get some of the luxuries that we like as developers while writing source code that can be executed directly by the browser.

Currently, we still rely on a build tool at Storyware. However, we have been looking into alternatives to npm, such as pnpm, and we have been able to reduce the complexity of our build step over the past few years. We still have some work to do, but we’ve been taking steps in the direction of simplicity and reducing technical debt.

A JavaScript Less Future?

Finally, Ameer Sami’s talk titled “A JavaScript Less Future?” discussed new APIs available in the browser, including popover, anchor, Navigation, View Transition, interpolate-size and others that can help reduce JavaScript code or remove the need for it altogether. The anchor and navigation APIs are of particular interest to me — anchoring elements to other elements on a page and handling page transitions are two unrelated but equally notorious sources of frustration in web development.

In a similar vein, I recently began using the dialog element to create modal (“popup”) dialogs, and it has been so much easier than implementing them from scratch in JavaScript. Finally having APIs for these things in the browser is amazing. What a time to be alive!

Long live MagnoliaConf

There were several other talks I really enjoyed and some I did not get a chance to attend. I hope to watch some of the ones I missed on YouTube if they become available.

Overall, the conference was great. The organizers Kayla and Richard Sween are good at giving it those downhome, Mississippi vibes, complete with cornbread and collard greens. I’m glad they brought back the conference this year, and I hope it grows in the years to come.