I hear you. Been doing webdev for over two decades, and I feel the exhaustion of modern tooling, most of which seems overly-complicated for the time involved and learning curve.

But, there are plenty of cool web things exciting me these days:

* FaaS and Serverless Computing - Cloudflare Workers/KV and Google Cloud Run in particular

* Cloud IDEs - Google Cloud Shell Editor (deploys straight to Cloud Run), Cloudflare Workers editor, Replit

* Site Builders - Carrd and Webflow in particular

* Focused libs - Handlebars.js and htmx in particular

* Simpler DevOps tools - WordOps in particular

* Languages - primarily C# .NET, but also using a ton of Node.js; did some Python recently; hoping to learn a little Go and Rust sometime.

Starting, and then launching, tiny side-projects and utilities that I need myself helps keep the fire going.

The users. it s the only think making it worth

The web isnt much fun to build because everything is built into very powerful but hard to use APIs. I would like to say that Webrtc is an awesome technology, but it s too much work as the browser does not abstract away things (we had that with Flash in 2002).

AR VR sound like something worth getting into , but again you need frameworks.

I used to have this idea of the browser being a 'glue' platform that bridges many different technologies. When you try to do that it gets quite bloated. I'd like browsers to integrate more UI things so people don't have to build the 100001th datetime selector thingy. Building things with PHP was fun because of the alt-tab,ctrl-r instant feedback which encourages experimentation. When you have to wait a minute for things to compile it s a chore.

Still, learning new frameworks, optimizations excites me just like the way I get excited about web dev when I was a teenager.

> I'd like to re-capture the joy I used to feel when I first started coding.

I got there by reducing complications. Am down to Go, SQLite, HTML, vanilla JS, and cmake. I feel much freer.

For me, excitement comes partly from the tooling but also partly from the purpose. I have been tinkering with a Hacker News front end that adds creature comforts like thumbnail images, and I have refound some of that thrill you describe. I guess it’s the challenge of solving a problem, you know? And as you describe it, perhaps you’ve been up against the same old problems again and again.

I pick my passion projects by what I myself want. I wanted a fancier HN, so I started http://www.thnr.net . And I like to convert articles and blog posts to audio so I can listen on the go, so I started a project for that: https://github.com/timoteostewart/benson . I guess I’m trying to inspire you to see what problems or challenges or friction you or friends and family have that tech may be able to solve (or at least alleviate). Best of luck, and hope you share what you decide to do here on HN.

I am impressed by what can be achieved in the browser itself these days. It seems there is massive capability which is not being used as much as it should because - "is there a framework for it?".

But most are too buggy for serious work and/or full of snoopware hooks.

When Apple throws a bone, e.g. with Web share https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gem1xvZd1Nw

WebAssembly