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Github is already littered with the dead carcasses of software using shiny new obsolete tools like gulp, grunt, and browserify to name just a tiny few. You hav

Github is already littered with the dead carcasses of software using shiny new obsolete tools like gulp, grunt, and browserify to name just a tiny few. You have to have a strong nose for bitrot and ruthlessly filter garbage out of the firehose, to work in web development today. If that package or tool hasn't been updated in 8 months, do you really want to learn it (and force your team to learn it), since it's practically abandonware already? It's a self-reinforcing cycle. You don't want to put your organization at existential risk by betting on the wrong horse. But there is no choice. Unless you want to get stuck having to hire Perl guys in an ocean of node ninja rockstars. Your company will be the ugly girl that didn't get asked to prom night. The pariah of Silicon Valley.

halayli 9y ago
true but you don’t have to go that far. React, webpack, and sometimes well maintained packages that depend on unmaintained packages suffer from this. I am not picking on web dev, it’s a general problem.
- purerandomness 9y ago
  It's a relatively new problem caused by an influx of inexperienced programmers who have to experience these problems first-hand. They do learn, but they can't teach what they learned because of the ever increasing influx of new, unexperienced programmers. I highly recommend this talk by Uncle Bob (have a tea and a foot bath, it's long): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecIWPzGEbFc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecIWPzGEbFc
  - flukus 9y ago
    I don't think it's just the influx of new developers, it's too many rockstars that only work on green fields applications, they can't and don't learn the long term consequences of their decisions. Not all of them are new programmers, they're just the epitome of 5 times 2 years of experience.
cookiecaper 9y ago
> You have to have a strong nose for bitrot and ruthlessly filter garbage out of the firehose, to work in web development today. This is a big test for the development community, and I don't know how it resolves. Are discerning coders who've seen this fad cycle before just going to have hold their noses and pretend to be gung-ho about the latest fad, or do they stick to their principles and say "Yeah, I'd use that if we had a good reason, but I just don't know many..."? Bear in mind, doing the latter just means some idiot who's read six lines of a blog post from TechCrunch is going to come in there repeating "blockchain" and "Kubernetes" non-stop until they get hired on the spot. We have a lot of people who've been misled into believing "copy Google and magical fairy unicorns will fly out of your butt" crawling all over this community, including a lot of under-experienced developers themselves who apparently don't realize that they're reaching outside of their comfort zone with this. It's very hard to find a company that isn't trying to get Kubernetes-ified as fast as they can. If you go into an interview and say that you're so-so on Kubernetes, it'd be like saying you don't like Node in 2014 or that you don't like Mongo in 2012 -- you're out the door. Every company needs to be like the cool kids and get the magic of the Great Googly Kubernetes smeared on themselves. This is of course very silly and bad from a technical standpoint, but it seems to primarily be about social standing. That's why something like EKS is so good. They just fork over some cash to Amazon and then they can tell everyone that they too use Kubernetes, and all of Google's hard-fought marketing effort goes down the tubes, since users are still glued to Amazon's platform.

halayli 9y ago

true but you don’t have to go that far. React, webpack, and sometimes well maintained packages that depend on unmaintained packages suffer from this. I am not picking on web dev, it’s a general problem.

purerandomness 9y ago
It's a relatively new problem caused by an influx of inexperienced programmers who have to experience these problems first-hand. They do learn, but they can't teach what they learned because of the ever increasing influx of new, unexperienced programmers. I highly recommend this talk by Uncle Bob (have a tea and a foot bath, it's long): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecIWPzGEbFc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecIWPzGEbFc
- flukus 9y ago
  I don't think it's just the influx of new developers, it's too many rockstars that only work on green fields applications, they can't and don't learn the long term consequences of their decisions. Not all of them are new programmers, they're just the epitome of 5 times 2 years of experience.

cookiecaper 9y ago

> You have to have a strong nose for bitrot and ruthlessly filter garbage out of the firehose, to work in web development today. This is a big test for the development community, and I don't know how it resolves. Are discerning coders who've seen this fad cycle before just going to have hold their noses and pretend to be gung-ho about the latest fad, or do they stick to their principles and say "Yeah, I'd use that if we had a good reason, but I just don't know many..."? Bear in mind, doing the latter just means some idiot who's read six lines of a blog post from TechCrunch is going to come in there repeating "blockchain" and "Kubernetes" non-stop until they get hired on the spot. We have a lot of people who've been misled into believing "copy Google and magical fairy unicorns will fly out of your butt" crawling all over this community, including a lot of under-experienced developers themselves who apparently don't realize that they're reaching outside of their comfort zone with this. It's very hard to find a company that isn't trying to get Kubernetes-ified as fast as they can. If you go into an interview and say that you're so-so on Kubernetes, it'd be like saying you don't like Node in 2014 or that you don't like Mongo in 2012 -- you're out the door. Every company needs to be like the cool kids and get the magic of the Great Googly Kubernetes smeared on themselves. This is of course very silly and bad from a technical standpoint, but it seems to primarily be about social standing. That's why something like EKS is so good. They just fork over some cash to Amazon and then they can tell everyone that they too use Kubernetes, and all of Google's hard-fought marketing effort goes down the tubes, since users are still glued to Amazon's platform.