Why product engineers can't build websites

Alexey Krasikov, Design Engineer at Paper, host of the Web Standards podcast. Nobody likes building websites: putting together a couple of pages seems too simple a task for a strong engineer. But when a product developer gets moved from the app to the website, the result is so-so... Engineers bring their usual patterns, architecture and shared stack into the website, and a simple site turns into a maintenance nightmare. Alexey has been building websites for 10 years: from small landing pages to projects with thousands of pages for AI startups, including Attio and Lovable. At these companies he had to argue for and defend his architecture all the way up to CTOs and founders, and then migrate live websites to a new stack. In this talk he'll explain why the website and the app should live separately: - separate frontend projects - different stacks and dependencies - their own design system - their own CI/CD and infrastructure Spoiler: the answer was always on the surface. It's just a website, and it should be built simpler.