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Accept the churn or be left behind, imo. The best thing you can do to insulate yourself from the pain described in the post (trying to remember how code worked

by daenz 7y ago

Accept the churn or be left behind, imo. The best thing you can do to insulate yourself from the pain described in the post (trying to remember how code worked, etc) is to brain dump important things you learn along the way. I've recently begun keeping a TiddlyWiki[0] for every major project I undertake. In it, I keep unexpected things I learned, cheat sheet items, command-line snippets, and longer form entries about structure. The best part is it was all written by me, so the communication barrier is as low as it can possibly be. Reading one of these TWs allows me to pick up a project again extremely quickly. It's also useful on large projects where different areas are like their own projects unto themselves. Tools, not closing yourself off, help you overcome your limitations. 0. https://tiddlywiki.com/ https://tiddlywiki.com/

rglover 7y ago
The more experience I gain, the more dubious I grow of the "being left behind" concept. It's rookie bait. With experience, you instinctively know when it's time to move on from a technology (it no longer serves its purpose well or at all) vs. jumping on the hype train to get some breeze in your hair.
- daenz 7y ago
  There's a difference between jumping on the hype train and being stubbornly stagnant. You will definitely be left behind if you refuse to adapt to new "industry standard" tech, even if all of that new tech is 90% old concepts with slight changes, repackaged. That's not to say you should jump on every new half-baked hackathon-originating javascript framework. But it does mean you should have your finger on the general area of the pulse of where the industry is moving, and start learning that tech. For example, pick up Rust for systems programming, instead of C. I know a web developer who refuses to learn or use any web tech besides PHP. Finds cloud-based hosting confusing as well. "I can do anything I need in PHP." Everything, except find good paying job that isn't maintaining gnarly legacy codebases. Doing PHP is his bread and butter, and unless he decides to learn some of the newer (stable) webdev tech, he's going to find himself with no marketable skills in the future.
preordained 7y ago
I get what you are saying, and on a certain practical level you are right, you can't be that guy who never moved past COBOL...but I think it needs to be super clear that you can accept the churn (as necessary) but you sure as hell don't embrace it. Embracing it, IMO, is how JavaScript dev got to be what it is. Broadly speaking, a lack of nuance and temperance is the great blight on development.

by daenz 7y ago

rglover 7y ago

The more experience I gain, the more dubious I grow of the "being left behind" concept. It's rookie bait. With experience, you instinctively know when it's time to move on from a technology (it no longer serves its purpose well or at all) vs. jumping on the hype train to get some breeze in your hair.

daenz 7y ago
There's a difference between jumping on the hype train and being stubbornly stagnant. You will definitely be left behind if you refuse to adapt to new "industry standard" tech, even if all of that new tech is 90% old concepts with slight changes, repackaged. That's not to say you should jump on every new half-baked hackathon-originating javascript framework. But it does mean you should have your finger on the general area of the pulse of where the industry is moving, and start learning that tech. For example, pick up Rust for systems programming, instead of C. I know a web developer who refuses to learn or use any web tech besides PHP. Finds cloud-based hosting confusing as well. "I can do anything I need in PHP." Everything, except find good paying job that isn't maintaining gnarly legacy codebases. Doing PHP is his bread and butter, and unless he decides to learn some of the newer (stable) webdev tech, he's going to find himself with no marketable skills in the future.

preordained 7y ago

I get what you are saying, and on a certain practical level you are right, you can't be that guy who never moved past COBOL...but I think it needs to be super clear that you can accept the churn (as necessary) but you sure as hell don't embrace it. Embracing it, IMO, is how JavaScript dev got to be what it is. Broadly speaking, a lack of nuance and temperance is the great blight on development.