> My entire career is now technical debt, or the code has been deprecated.
Contrary to the author, for me, over my entire career, I feel like I have been relatively incredibly lucky with my choices of 1) What (web) technologies to invest lots of time into, and 2) Therefore what tools I use in my own projects and at companies I have worked for.
I think that 50% of the reason is down to when I was born and therefore when I started my software engineering career (for example, therefore avoiding lots of bad alleyways that web dev went down), and 50% was just common sense (realizing early-on that X tool was obviously going to be superior to Y tool).
1. I was fortunate enough to be born at a time such that I just about missed the AngularJS --> Angular2 betrayal + debacle.
2. I realized, through playing around with the Angular2 beta around 2014 (IIRC), that it was going to be inferior to React. I remember that at the time React was this tiny thing that had existed for around a year or so, but it was clearly conceptually superior, with more talented Facebook developers behind it vs the Google developers behind the early Angular2.
Not to be too disparaging or direspectful, but at least in the early days, it felt like Angular2 was made by a team of your usual C++ Google engineers who didn't have a lot of experience with web dev. Just being honest here...
This lead me to A) selecting React for my personal projects, and B) advising to pick React at companies I worked for. This meant that there are React codebases that I contributed to ~8 years ago that are still active at companies today.
3. Through sheer luck, I started my true web dev career after the "random crazy insecure web technologies" era such as Flash, Java applets, and all that nonsense.
4. Through sheer luck, I started my true web dev career shortly after Typescript was created, and I just happened to use a framework (now non-existent) which used it, co-introducing it to me in ~2014. This meant that I have been able to create relatively maintainable Typescript codebases, mostly avoiding creating any quick-to-deprecate JS mess-heaps.
There are a couple more examples, but I think that captures why I feel so lucky. I feel bad for the engineers that, through a combination of bad luck (time born, time entering the field, etc.) and lack of foresight, were led down paths causing them to invest a tonne of time into technologies that were just never going to be around for the long-run.
My time will likely come where my luck runs out, and I end up investing a tonne of time into some nonsense tech that initially seems solid but ends up rubbish for whatever reason, but for now, I'm quite pleased :)
Contrary to the author, for me, over my entire career, I feel like I have been relatively incredibly lucky with my choices of 1) What (web) technologies to invest lots of time into, and 2) Therefore what tools I use in my own projects and at companies I have worked for.
I think that 50% of the reason is down to when I was born and therefore when I started my software engineering career (for example, therefore avoiding lots of bad alleyways that web dev went down), and 50% was just common sense (realizing early-on that X tool was obviously going to be superior to Y tool).
1. I was fortunate enough to be born at a time such that I just about missed the AngularJS --> Angular2 betrayal + debacle.
2. I realized, through playing around with the Angular2 beta around 2014 (IIRC), that it was going to be inferior to React. I remember that at the time React was this tiny thing that had existed for around a year or so, but it was clearly conceptually superior, with more talented Facebook developers behind it vs the Google developers behind the early Angular2.
Not to be too disparaging or direspectful, but at least in the early days, it felt like Angular2 was made by a team of your usual C++ Google engineers who didn't have a lot of experience with web dev. Just being honest here...
This lead me to A) selecting React for my personal projects, and B) advising to pick React at companies I worked for. This meant that there are React codebases that I contributed to ~8 years ago that are still active at companies today.
3. Through sheer luck, I started my true web dev career after the "random crazy insecure web technologies" era such as Flash, Java applets, and all that nonsense.
4. Through sheer luck, I started my true web dev career shortly after Typescript was created, and I just happened to use a framework (now non-existent) which used it, co-introducing it to me in ~2014. This meant that I have been able to create relatively maintainable Typescript codebases, mostly avoiding creating any quick-to-deprecate JS mess-heaps.
There are a couple more examples, but I think that captures why I feel so lucky. I feel bad for the engineers that, through a combination of bad luck (time born, time entering the field, etc.) and lack of foresight, were led down paths causing them to invest a tonne of time into technologies that were just never going to be around for the long-run.
My time will likely come where my luck runs out, and I end up investing a tonne of time into some nonsense tech that initially seems solid but ends up rubbish for whatever reason, but for now, I'm quite pleased :)