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I stopped keeping up to date with the latest "trendy" JavaScript frameworks when I realized it was tanking my productivity. New JS libraries are coming out sev

I stopped keeping up to date with the latest "trendy" JavaScript frameworks when I realized it was tanking my productivity. New JS libraries are coming out several times per year, and employers and engineers expect you to be familiar with them in order to get hired (e.x., we need React, Angular, Ember, Node and Meteor skills). But what really happens, is when you have 12 months of time, and you need to know a new library / framework every three months you are burning something like four months of time per year just getting used to the new tech. With RoR & AngularJS 1.5 I get a full-stack web application loaded with best practices that I can keep chugging away at building without ever worrying about what I need to hop onto next month.

sotojuan 11y ago
This is what makes people frustrated: They feel the need to change their stack. In reality, what matters is that you ship good software. If you are comfortable with Rails and Angular like you are, there's no need to change your stack to Node and React. Sure, it may be beneficial to take a look at them just out of curiosity, but no one's forcing you to use them if you don't like them!
dredmorbius 11y ago
That's an excellent nutshell description of one mode of a productivity / technology trap that I've noted for quite some time. I've been in and about technology since the late 1970s. There've been periods where it seemed that there were a large number of new technologies being promoted -- OLE, SOAP, and XML were several of the big ones, with a burst seeming to emerge just as the first dot-com bubble shattered. I still recall walking into a (now closed, of course) technical bookstore in a tech hub, and finding an O'Reilly title I hadn't seen before, with the blurb "The only book on $TECHNOLOGY_X you'll ever need". I did my standard scan: title page, contents, introduction, index. I never got the least idea of what $TECHNOLOGY_X was. That said, the blurb was accurate -- it was the only book I'd ever need, it only neglected to consider that I never needed it. For young techies who happened to cut their teeth on a skillset that is widely adopted by the industry, the world is your oyster. Eventually, that skillset erodes or is abandoned. I watched that happen to mainframe and VMS programmers, to Perl hackers, to various all-inclusive toolkits aimed at what were once called "Open Systems" (apparently nobody wanted to say "Unix"). And many Microsoft technologies (though some have been surprisingly robust). I'm watching it now with the set of Web technologies that have emerged post-2005. For many HN readers, Rails, Ajax, Angular, etc., are all you've ever known. For others, they're one more set of word-and-TLA-salad tossed out in front of us. When I cared to do so, I'd learn the technologies in front of me, well, and try to keep an eye on what's coming down the pipe. But with tech half-lives measured in single-digit years, if not months, that's increasingly difficult. And frankly, the results are also increasingly difficult to deal with. I see a recaptitulation coming, almost certainly with a vast simplification. I strongly suspect that someone's going to look up from Node.js-SOAP-COBOL one day and realise that they're accomplishing nothing Codd, Englebert, or Ritchie didn't pressage decades ago. We'll get a simple document format. Probably based on HTML or LaTeX. We'll get an applications platform. Commerce will be standardised to a small set of apps, almost certainly growing out of iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, eBay, or Craigslist, or someone taking on one of their positions. Media will get its own dedicated standalone player. And the titles "Web Designer" and "Web Applications Engineer" will be consigned to the same Schumpeterian scrap-heap of history as "stable boy". Perhaps retained for sentimental value by a small group of eccentric (although, by definition, fanatical) hobbyists. But otherwise rightly forgotten.

sotojuan 11y ago

This is what makes people frustrated: They feel the need to change their stack. In reality, what matters is that you ship good software. If you are comfortable with Rails and Angular like you are, there's no need to change your stack to Node and React. Sure, it may be beneficial to take a look at them just out of curiosity, but no one's forcing you to use them if you don't like them!

dredmorbius 11y ago

That's an excellent nutshell description of one mode of a productivity / technology trap that I've noted for quite some time. I've been in and about technology since the late 1970s. There've been periods where it seemed that there were a large number of new technologies being promoted -- OLE, SOAP, and XML were several of the big ones, with a burst seeming to emerge just as the first dot-com bubble shattered. I still recall walking into a (now closed, of course) technical bookstore in a tech hub, and finding an O'Reilly title I hadn't seen before, with the blurb "The only book on $TECHNOLOGY_X you'll ever need". I did my standard scan: title page, contents, introduction, index. I never got the least idea of what $TECHNOLOGY_X was. That said, the blurb was accurate -- it was the only book I'd ever need, it only neglected to consider that I never needed it. For young techies who happened to cut their teeth on a skillset that is widely adopted by the industry, the world is your oyster. Eventually, that skillset erodes or is abandoned. I watched that happen to mainframe and VMS programmers, to Perl hackers, to various all-inclusive toolkits aimed at what were once called "Open Systems" (apparently nobody wanted to say "Unix"). And many Microsoft technologies (though some have been surprisingly robust). I'm watching it now with the set of Web technologies that have emerged post-2005. For many HN readers, Rails, Ajax, Angular, etc., are all you've ever known. For others, they're one more set of word-and-TLA-salad tossed out in front of us. When I cared to do so, I'd learn the technologies in front of me, well, and try to keep an eye on what's coming down the pipe. But with tech half-lives measured in single-digit years, if not months, that's increasingly difficult. And frankly, the results are also increasingly difficult to deal with. I see a recaptitulation coming, almost certainly with a vast simplification. I strongly suspect that someone's going to look up from Node.js-SOAP-COBOL one day and realise that they're accomplishing nothing Codd, Englebert, or Ritchie didn't pressage decades ago. We'll get a simple document format. Probably based on HTML or LaTeX. We'll get an applications platform. Commerce will be standardised to a small set of apps, almost certainly growing out of iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, eBay, or Craigslist, or someone taking on one of their positions. Media will get its own dedicated standalone player. And the titles "Web Designer" and "Web Applications Engineer" will be consigned to the same Schumpeterian scrap-heap of history as "stable boy". Perhaps retained for sentimental value by a small group of eccentric (although, by definition, fanatical) hobbyists. But otherwise rightly forgotten.