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Don't forget how your knowledge becomes out of date with frightening speed. I can read a novel and that knowledge will be good for decades. Documentation on you

Don't forget how your knowledge becomes out of date with frightening speed. I can read a novel and that knowledge will be good for decades. Documentation on your favorite web framework? 6 months if you're lucky.

Retric 6y ago
That’s overblown, jQuery for example hasn’t changed much in the last 5 years. The bleeding edge changes rapidly, but that’s what it’s there for.
0xffff2 6y ago
I think this is a unique problem for a subset of front-end developers. In the rest of the software engineering world, "old" software seems to work just fine if you're not easily distracted by shiny baubles, and in some sectors (e.g. embedded systems) the state of the art hardly changes much in any single person's career.
- skohan 6y ago
  I would say even in a shifting landscape of different tools/frameworks, the differences are mostly aesthetic, and the fundamentals mostly carry over. For instance, at various stages in my career, I've done professional work in a lot of different languages and ecosystems: c/c++, objC, Java, Node.js, Swift, React, Rust - and each one of these has it's unique features, strengths, and weaknesses, but I think in general the more different tools you use, the more you see how much they have in common. For instance, when I pick up a new framework or language, I'm looking for the same basic things: like how does the build system work, and how do I make an http request, how do I optimize for performance, and then I'm generally plugging the new tool into the same design patterns I've been using for years.
- beagle3 6y ago
  The domain of "software engineering" keeps changing. It used to include (what is now) DevOps as an integral part, but now it's becoming its own discipline. If you do algorithms, nothing changed. If you do frontend, everything changed. If you do backend, change is slower - you are now expected to master (the misleadingly named) serverless; and you are once more not considered uncool for preferring an RDBMS to a NoSQL.
mainstreem 6y ago
This is the real reason I use Emacs instead of whatever is popular right now (VSCode today, Sublime yesterday, Atom yesterday, JetBrains as long as they will support it, Borland in the 90s) -- it's been around for over 30 freakin years! I'm sick of investing in tools that change faster than I can learn them.

Retric 6y ago

That’s overblown, jQuery for example hasn’t changed much in the last 5 years. The bleeding edge changes rapidly, but that’s what it’s there for.

0xffff2 6y ago

I think this is a unique problem for a subset of front-end developers. In the rest of the software engineering world, "old" software seems to work just fine if you're not easily distracted by shiny baubles, and in some sectors (e.g. embedded systems) the state of the art hardly changes much in any single person's career.

skohan 6y ago
I would say even in a shifting landscape of different tools/frameworks, the differences are mostly aesthetic, and the fundamentals mostly carry over. For instance, at various stages in my career, I've done professional work in a lot of different languages and ecosystems: c/c++, objC, Java, Node.js, Swift, React, Rust - and each one of these has it's unique features, strengths, and weaknesses, but I think in general the more different tools you use, the more you see how much they have in common. For instance, when I pick up a new framework or language, I'm looking for the same basic things: like how does the build system work, and how do I make an http request, how do I optimize for performance, and then I'm generally plugging the new tool into the same design patterns I've been using for years.
beagle3 6y ago
The domain of "software engineering" keeps changing. It used to include (what is now) DevOps as an integral part, but now it's becoming its own discipline. If you do algorithms, nothing changed. If you do frontend, everything changed. If you do backend, change is slower - you are now expected to master (the misleadingly named) serverless; and you are once more not considered uncool for preferring an RDBMS to a NoSQL.

mainstreem 6y ago

This is the real reason I use Emacs instead of whatever is popular right now (VSCode today, Sublime yesterday, Atom yesterday, JetBrains as long as they will support it, Borland in the 90s) -- it's been around for over 30 freakin years! I'm sick of investing in tools that change faster than I can learn them.