Had an interesting conversation today with a buddy of mine. He was telling me
about how he’s mastered gulp and right on cue, I asked “why not webpack”?
No, I didn’t triage that into a lecture about how superior Arch Linux is or
anything. Quite the opposite, I got to wondering about what’s next.
For all I know, there’s some new hotness out there that the coolest of the cool
kids are already using and by the time it gets to me, it’ll be a few years out
of fashion.
I’m okay with that as well because I don’t subscribe to new being better. Old
and stable tends to be the tortoise in a lot of ways.
The world of technology is a noisy place these days. Just the other day I read
about somebody writing something that could generate an entire web page just
from a trash fire of a query string.
There’s a lot of that out there. Pet projects that probably will never take off.
People taking existing stuff and rebuilding it from the ground up to accommodate
some edge case that they care too much about.
So how does one keep up with all of the cool new stuff out there? Should you
wait around for the big companies to adopt certain things to ensure that there
will be some longevity to the projects or just dive in on every new thing that
improves your developer experience?
I like to stay informed, but I try to not jump on the bandwagon as soon as it
rolls through town. Last time I went big on something, it was Meteor, which at
the time I loved, but never did get the adoption that it needed.
Sorry if you expected this to be a robust post on how to keep up with the latest
and greatest stuff out there. I’ve yet to crack the code but a mix of
newsletters and listening to my friend’s recommendations has kept me from
feeling like I’ve let myself slip into the dark ages.
With that, I still use gulp on some projects too 😉
Not because I still actively use it, but because the projects are old and at the
end of the day, it’s still getting the job done.
