(front-end dev) Couple years ago when Google+ was the new kid on the block, I made a tiny userscript that hooked into their DOM and cleaned the UI up a bit. Yo

(front-end dev) Couple years ago when Google+ was the new kid on the block, I made a tiny userscript that hooked into their DOM and cleaned the UI up a bit. You'd think this was an easy task and you'd be right except it was quite a pain in the rear to maintain the extension. Google kept changing the classes and IDs, and moved the DOM around so frequently (sometimes within hours of the previous change) that my extension was constantly broken, and all my time was spent tweaking my code to keep pace with the changes propagating from an entire team of Googlers and their automated commit bots. It wasn't long before I gave up on the effort. Following front-end trends today feels exactly like that experience; there's a whole host of prolific authors, even teams, coming up with new approaches for almost every nut and bolt in the stack. I think for the time-constrained it's best to wait for the wheat to rise above the chaff, even it means falling behind the curve a bit.