Software development has never been easier and yet it feels as though we still have a long ways to go.

Thanks to open source and the incredibly low barrier for contribution, due primarily to the web and github in particular, there’s an almost endless selection of programming languages, libraries, frameworks, and even protocols to choose from for your next project.

This popular xkcd comic sums up the situation nicely:

Replace the word ‘standards’ with any part of your development stack and it’s enough to overwhelm even the most senior engineer:

It’s not as bad as all that though. It’s still possible to specialize and go deep on your platform of choice and know the ins-and-outs such that you can avoid common pitfalls like the above scenario. But it’s that expectation of deep hacker-news-like zen mastery of platforms, even ones you don’t work on day-to-day, that irks me.

More than a knowledge problem, what we’ve got here is a usability problem. While product management for internal tools has been steadily gaining support, the same attention has been entirely absent from developer tooling, libraries and APIs. Even a little extra attention in this space can go a long way.

Jitter aims to fill that gap. Stay tuned!