DEV Community: Ben Szymanski

Nah, the Umbraco Community Hasn't Lost It's Spark - We Have

Ben Szymanski — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 22:45:56 +0000

What a contradictory title, please let me explain.

This article is a response to Owain William's thought-provoking blogpost, Has the Umbraco Community lost its Spark?

While I understand where Owain is coming from and I too feel the change, I'd like to set up a defense: It's not Umbraco, it's not you, it's not me.

So what has changed?

We're Exhausted

We're all grinding harder just to tread water, trying our best to cling to the standard of living we once took for granted. Less time for Discord banter, fewer swag selfies on Umbraco Tees Day. Sound familiar?

While I agree with Owain, I just can't stand this characterization assassination of the Umbraco community. This despair (dramatic?) is all over the place. I have seen video after video show up on my YouTube feed lamenting the zombification and decline of community over the last few years.

In one, the host described a recent trip to the Kentucky Derby where he was shocked at the low attendance, the lack of inebriation of those who did attend, and at the relatively disconnected feeling of the entire event - a sharp contrast against the years of decades of the past.

I have never been, but I feel it too. Christmases, thanksgivings, halloweens, independence days, none of these feel the same lately. Hell, malls barely bother with holiday displays anymore, and it doesn't seem to matter because no one has the time to enjoy them anyway. These occasions now blend into any other day, and I feel horrible for this generation of children being deprived of the same joy I had.

People are so eager to blame this zombification on smartphone usage, but that's such a lazy analysis and so far off the mark that it makes my skin crawl.

In this response, I'll walk you through how we are being slowly and invisible suffocated by compounding financialization of every segment of our economy. It's crept in over decades, draining joy from what we love, bit by bit.

You probably haven't heard this story before. I'll admit up front: this is going to be contrarian and politically incorrect, but I promise to do my best to be truthful and objective.

How Did We Get Here?

The 2008 crisis wasn't fixed; it was papered over. Politicians bailed out arrogant and irresponsible bankers in a now familiar pattern of "socialism for corporations, capitalism for the rest."

The "fix" for the 2008 crisis was to pretend the whole thing never happened: reinflate the asset bubbles, but with stricter rules this time. This kicked off the funny-money era, but bad policy started in 1971 when we ditched the gold standard, a Bretton Woods/post-WWII holdover, to cover the costs of the Vietnam War.

Through the 2010s, every hiccup or slowdown triggered Fed rate cuts, plunging deeper into a ZIRP (zero interest rate policy) environment. We had historic low interest rates on everything, and money was cheap. Each rate cut did in fact stimulate economic activity and kept the economy from actually, finally, correcting. You likely observed this in your own life with residential home mortgages, or in the news with historic investment banking deals.

Analysts gawked at the "depravity" of this tactic, which was a decisive turn from what is considered conventional and sound financial policy. Trillions of dollars were printed out of thin air, also know as QE (quantitative easing), which debased the US dollar. These analysts were predicting bubble-pop events for years, none of which materialized, always stymied by another round of QE.

Still, the dollar's status was protected, as it held as reserve king in petrodollar trades (buying and selling oil), and foreign Treasury hoarding (foreign countries buying our debt). Or to put it another way, by being "the least dirtiest toilet paper" around.

It worked, until September 2019's repo crisis. Liquidity vanished, rates spiked to 10%. Banks swapped assets (consumer mortgages, consumer auto loans) for Fed cash to avoid collapse. The trigger still isn't clear, but most believe it to be a combination of regulatory scars, reserve shortages, and second-order pain from Trump's 2018 tariffs, which sparked a mini-recession in manufacturing. By September 2019, the runway for QE had run out. Interest rates couldn't be cut any further, and the roosters were coming home to roost.

This should have triggered a crash, or "correction," but just months later the world was thrown into COVID chaos, while spending bills were quickly passed to inject liquidity into the financial system and stimulate the economy, in the range of trillions of dollars. This effectively masked the repo crisis, but kicked off insidious inflation, which has transformed into "stagflation."

In a "stagflation" scenario, prices remain high, even as demand drops. This irrational, but very real phenomenon runs contrary to Econ 101, which tells us that as the cost of goods rise, demand drops (and vice versa). There's no real way to handle this scenario, as a citizen, except to hold hard assets (real estate, gold), invest (and hope the market doesn't pop), or find ways to hustle harder and make more money. Financial institutions don't really have an answer for addressing stagflation, either, except to play shell games increasing and decreasing interest rates in a desperate attempt to try and keep the circus going.

Just last week (October 2025), the repo market way haywire again as banks struggle with liquidity issues, speculated to be caused by the current longest-ever historical US government shutdown.

There are two ways to solve this stagflation problem, and politicians are now facing a cliff: they can decide to keep printing and let inflation rip, or decide to let a very painful but proper correction hit (overdue since 2008), with the upside that we return to value and fundamental financial policy. Take your best on which they'll pick.

It's Not Umbraco

We're all now working harder to maintain the standard of living we're used to, we have less time and means to participate in communities. Our employers tighten down in austerity, layoffs continue to accelerate across the industry, creating a chilling effect.

And then one day, all of the sudden, you're just tired. Real, fucking, tired.

Kudos to Owain for spotting this, but it's not just the Umbraco community. The broader financialization of our economy means this broken system applies to every facet of your life, even your Chipotle burritos.

This isn't a failure of the Umbraco community not showing up, or of Umbraco not investing enough, or of the devrel team not working hard enough (how many festivals and community meetups have been re-ignited in the last few years?). I'd actually argue that Umbraco and festival committees seem to be doing more than I can ever remember. What we're all feeling is the endgame of an ugly economic war so raw that no politician would dare be honest about.

Inflation is silently stealing our live, breaking our spirits, and it's extremely unfair.

Nah, the Umbraco Community Hasn't Lost It's Spark - We Have

Ben Szymanski — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 22:30:55 +0000

What a contradictory title, please allow me to explain.

This article is a response to Owain William's thought-provoking blogpost, Has the Umbraco Community lost its Spark?

While I understand where Owain is coming from and I too feel the change, I'd like to set up a defense: It's not Umbraco, and it's not the community.

So what has changed?

We're Exhausted

While I agree with Owain, I just can't stand this characterization of the Umbraco community. This despair (dramatic?) is all over the place. I have seen video after video show up on my YouTube feed lamenting the zombification and decline of the community over the last few years.

In one, the host described a recent trip to the Kentucky Derby where he was shocked at the low attendance, the lack of inebriation of those who did attend, and at the relatively disconnected feeling of the entire event—a sharp contrast against the years of decades of the past.

I have never been, but I feel it too. Christmases, thanksgivings, halloweens, independence days, none of these feel the same lately. Hell, shopping malls barely bother with holiday displays or Black Friday sales anymore, and it doesn't seem to matter because no one has the time to enjoy them anyway. These occasions now blend into any other day, and I feel horrible for this generation of children being deprived of the same joy I had.

People are so eager to blame this zombification on smartphone usage, but that's such a lazy analysis and so far off the mark that it makes my skin crawl.

In this response, I'll walk you through how we are being slowly and invisibly suffocated by compounding financialization of every segment of our economy. It's crept in over decades, draining joy from what we love, bit by bit.

You probably haven't heard this story before. I'll admit up front: this is going to be contrarian and politically incorrect, but I promise to do my best to be truthful and objective.

How Did We Get Here?

The 2008 crisis wasn't fixed; it was papered over. Politicians bailed out arrogant and irresponsible bankers in a now familiar pattern of "socialism for corporations, capitalism for the rest."

The "fix" for the 2008 crisis was to pretend the whole thing never happened: reinflate the asset bubbles, but with stricter rules this time. This kicked off the funny-money era, but bad policy can be traced back further, to 1971, when we ditched the gold standard, a Bretton Woods/post-WWII holdover, to cover the costs of the Vietnam War.

Through the 2010s, every hiccup or slowdown triggered Fed rate cuts, plunging us deeper into a ZIRP (zero interest rate policy) environment. We had historic low interest rates on everything, and money was inexpensive. Each rate cut did in fact stimulate economic activity and kept the economy from actually, finally, correcting. You likely observed this in your own life with residential home mortgages, or in the news with historic investment banking deals.

Analysts gawked at the unprecedented depravity of this tactic, which was a decisive turn from what is considered conventional and sound monetary policy. Trillions of dollars were printed out of thin air, also known as QE (quantitative easing), which debased the US dollar. These analysts were predicting bubble-pop events for years, none of which materialized, as rounds of QE always stymied typical recession indicators.

Still, the dollar's status was protected, as it held strong as reserve king in petrodollar trades (buying and selling oil), and foreign Treasury hoarding (foreign countries buying our debt). Or to put it another way, by being "the least dirtiest toilet paper" around.

This strategy worked for about a decade, until September 2019's repo crisis. Liquidity vanished, rates spiked to 10%. Banks swapped assets (consumer mortgages, consumer auto loans) for quick injections of cash from the FED to avoid collapse. The trigger still isn't clear, but most believe it to be a combination of regulatory scars, reserve shortages, and second-order pain from Trump's 2018 tariffs, which sparked a mini-recession in manufacturing. By September 2019, the runway for more QE had run out. Interest rates couldn't be cut any further. The roosters were coming home to roost.

This should have triggered a crash, or "correction," but just months later the world was thrown into COVID chaos, while spending bills were quickly passed to inject liquidity into the financial system and stimulate the economy, in the range of trillions of dollars. This effectively masked the repo crisis but kicked off an insidious cycle of inflation, which has since transformed into "stagflation."

In a "stagflation" scenario, prices remain high, even as demand drops. This irrational, but very real phenomenon runs contrary to Econ 101, which tells us that as the cost of goods rises, demand drops (and vice versa). There's no real way to handle this scenario, as an individual, except to hold hard assets (real estate, gold), invest (and hope the market doesn't pop), or find ways to hustle harder and make more money. Financial institutions don't really have an answer for addressing stagflation, either, except to play shell games increasing and decreasing interest rates in a desperate attempt to try and keep the circus going.

Just last week (October 2025), the repo market went haywire again as banks struggled with liquidity issues, speculated to be triggered by the current longest-ever historical US government shutdown.

There are two ways to solve this stagflation problem, and politicians are now facing a decision cliff: keep printing money and let inflation rip, or let an excruciating but proper correction hit (now delayed by well over a decade), with the upside that we return to a valuable economy and sound monetary policy.

Take your best guess on which they'll pick.

It's Not Umbraco

We're all now working harder to maintain the standard of living we're used to, we have less time and means to participate in communities, Umbraco, or otherwise. Our employers tighten down on austerity, the cost of living increases, layoffs continue to accelerate across the industry, exacerbating these conditions and ultimately creating a chilling effect.

And then one day, all of a sudden, you're just tired. Real, fucking, tired.

This isn't a failure of the Umbraco community not showing up, or of Umbraco not investing enough, or of the devrel team not working hard enough. (How many festivals and community meetups have been re-ignited in the last few years? phew!) I'd actually argue that Umbraco and festival committees seem to be doing more than I can ever remember.

What we're all feeling is the endgame of an economic warzone so ugly that no politician would dare be honest about it.

Inflation is silently stealing our lives, breaking our spirits, destroying our communities. Make no mistake: you're living in dystopia.

HTMX & Umbraco: Powertool meet Powertool

Ben Szymanski — Fri, 21 Mar 2025 22:19:25 +0000

Update - This series, including part two, are now published over at Skrift. Head over there to continue reading!

Umbracians, as far as I can tell, are mostly shielded from the online noise surrounding server-side and client-side rendering/environments. Many of us prefer to render our pages server-side, passing nicely typed view model objects into Razor templates, rarely considering much else. While we seem to put more energy into helping each other out and building our own special Umbraco ecosystem, the greater web development landscape has been convulsing through an identity crisis. This drama and sometimes cognitive dissonance-inducing chaos are partially fueled by a mix of a new class of YouTube-promoted software developer influencers, as well as promises of easy six-figure salaries from coding bootcamps.

At first glance, it appears that ReactJS and NextJS are the cause of this strife, but if you zoom out, this is really a battle between client-side and server-side rendering. And if you really zoom out, you’ll notice that it’s more of a question of whether the web platform should be treated as a distributed application platform, something that competes with the native environments, or if the web should be preserved as the hypermedia system it was conceived as.

Many have lamented the popularity of the web application platform direction, but perhaps the more comprehensive, well-thought, and contrarian writing comes from Carson Gross in his book, Hypermedia Systems.

If you’re unfamiliar with his short and easily digestible ode to hypermedia, it’s part reintroduction to hypermedia, and part tour of how to use Carson’s HTMX library. Hypermedia Systems is thorough and well-written, and the reintroduction section does a great job at rewiring your brain from thinking “this is the old (jQuery) way to do this” to embracing a refreshed approach to creating dynamic and interactive websites.

For the first time, I had seen vocabulary to describe what I was observing elsewhere, and I became completely captivated and started figuring out how I could layer HTMX on top of Umbraco.

You should absolutely read his book (it’s free), but in this article I’ll cover a few highlights to pique your interest, and then demonstrate how we too, Umbracians, can enhance our websites using a hypermedia approach.

Defining a Hypermedia System

What is a hypermedia system? It’s a networked architecture that contains digital media (text, images, videos), which are wrapped in structure (HTML tags), and the content contains hyperlinks to other content (in our case, these are simple a=href’s). All three elements are returned together in a single response from the remote host.

This soup of content, markup and navigation is returned to a user agent (for example, but not limited to!) a web browser, which is then presented to the end user. The user agent is responsible for a single thing - presenting the content in its interface, however it pleases. In a hypermedia system, the user agent does not store or maintain state; instead, that responsibility is largely ejected out to the remote host, and no two responses are guaranteed to return the same content or outward navigation.

It all seemed so exciting - hyperlinks! - and it was in the early 1990s. By the mid-1990s, forms were added to the HTML spec with version 2.0, and additional verbs were added to the HTTP protocol, resulting in HTTP 1.1. This prompted Marc Andreessen to boldly proclaim Windows as a “collection of badly debugged device drivers.”

“Netscape will soon reduce Windows to a poorly debugged set of device drivers.” - Marc Andreessen, 1995

Later, Roy Fielding brilliantly distilled his understanding of this architecture, describing what we know today as a REST API. That is, receiving partial responses of HTML as valid behavior.

Yes, you read that right - a single REST API response should return fragments of content, structure, and navigation. And herein lies one of Carson’s often repeated gripes - a JSON API is not a REST API, it’s a data API. Carson argues that the field of web development has been corrupted by the latter definition, a complete rewrite (or misunderstanding) of Roy Fielding’s definition! Outrageous!

The tragic result of this misunderstanding? We’ve shoehorned the older (yes, older) thick-client application architecture (you’ll recognize these in a contemporary fashion as a SPA or PWA) onto the most successful hypermedia system of all human existence.

Google deserves a good portion of the blame for this sacrilege. While succeeding with Android as an alternative to iOS, they failed to create a culturally relevant alternative to iOS. They struck out on a mission to create a modern competing platform — the progressive web application, or PWA. PWAs seek to essentially recreate the functionality of a native mobile app environment inside of the browser, including features to make web applications available offline and access hardware (camera, sensors).

Idealist developers who thought that Apple's "walled garden" approach to software distribution was misguided (if not harmful), and web developers who had little interest in learning a native SDK, embraced PWAs.

Today, we observe the web heading toward a far cry from what it was originally envisioned as. In the process, we’re erasing the best attributes of that very hypermedia system, and it would appear that many developers don’t know the difference or care to understand.

To put it another way, the most successful hypermedia system of all time has been reduced to a facsimile of Microsoft’s “Click-Once” deployment technique. How the tables turn.

I Reject This

In my professional experience, the explosion of ReactJS and later, NextJS, has resulted in bloated web applications, an introduction of hard problems into what was once a very simple and accessible platform, duplicated logic between client and server, and often requiring reimplementing facilities of what established back-end frameworks (Django, Rails) have long shipped with (pagination, form validation).

We’re writing all sorts of front-end code that we simply do not need to write, except to appease budding junior developers who teethed on NextJS.

Web projects take longer than they should, and have classes of issues that are tedious to address when using things like React, issues that often handled in the most bog-standard of ways by established server-side frameworks.

And hey, ReactJS is an easy, winning career technology stack to put yourself in. Even as a self-proclaimed “hater,” I begrudgingly shipped React/NextJS code for years at Vimeo for a nice paycheck.

The Tidelas Project

I created my premier website, Tidelas, first using Django and VueJS, then later Django and HTMX, before lifting the entire site and porting it to live on top of Umbraco with HTMX.

The Django and HTMX combination was glorious. I was able to implement so many wonderful features very quickly and easily, and felt like I was running circles around myself and my team at Vimeo.

I later realized that I did not like the editing experience of Django admin for such a content-heavy website, so I ported the entire project to Umbraco, and I brought HTMX along for the ride.

In the forthcoming, follow-up article, I'll show you how I was able to mix HTMX into Umbraco for a best of both worlds architecture.