Simon MacDonald
Simon MacDonald has 20 years of development experience and has worked on a variety of projects including object oriented databases, police communication systems, speech recognition, unified messaging and mobile development. His current focus is convincing folks “you aren’t going to need it” when it comes to building web applications as the Head of Developer Experience at Begin.
Montreal 2026 sessions
No Frameworks for Old Devs
English session - Beginner
Once upon a time, we built websites with just HTML, CSS, and a sprinkle of JavaScript. Then came the frameworks, the bundlers, the transpilers, and the Great NPM Dependency Flood of ’15. Suddenly, shipping a “Hello World” meant downloading half the internet.
But what if you don’t actually need all that baggage? In this talk, we’ll dust off the basics and see how modern browsers let you build rich, interactive web apps—no frameworks required!
