We all know that both software and hardware is innovated daily (if not hourly) these days. If you used node 10.1 yesterday it's time for 10.8 today. Those who don't use Docker and Kubernetes and so on are viewed as ancient relics. As a frontend developer you need to keep track of react, redux, respond, gulp, grunt, bower, yarn, etc, etc, etc.
New frameworks are released daily. For javascript there's even a website called "Days since last javascript framework" ( https://dayssincelastjavascriptframework.com/ ) that is always single digit - and most often at 0.
New languages are released daily. Only the past few weeks we've all seen Hacker news -posts about Joy-lang, Markdeep-lang, Pole-lang, Kitten-lang and so on.
You probably think this ranting cranky old (32 yrs) man is tired of keeping up - but thats not really the point. I love IT partly because of the innovations happening constantly. I love IT because everyone can make their thing and get a wide spread when releasing it.
There are two things about it all that annoys me though;
1) People seem to put some kind of prestige in the freshness of knowledge. If you're blogging about the framework that was released 15 minutes ago you're apparently awesome.
What about really learning something? No matter how quickly you learn things you cannot be really good at it after a few weeks. Use the new framework in a few customer projects, refactor it a few times over a longer period of time, then you can start to claim real knowledge in it and then I'd love to read your blog post.
What happened to "the right tool for the right problem"? The latest language or deployment tool cannot possibly be the right tool for every single problem. Docker for example cannot be the best choice for every deployment or hosting situation - even if Docker is a great tool.
2) People tend to learn a framework and claim to know the language. This, yet again, is shown clearly when it comes to Javascript. I've seen plenty of frontend developers who claim to know Javascript when what they really know is React and JQuery. They know frameworks and tools written in a language, they don't know the language.
Another great example is backend developers that constantly argue the greatness of using an ORM. Why not learn SQL?! SQL is simple yet powerful. Unlike an ORM you can actually optimize an SQL query using your knowledge. When using an ORM you can simply call the functions that someone else wrote based on their knowledge of SQL - and you have close to no idea of what's actually happening.
I expect being shot down plenty of times for my above ranting but that's all part of the game and I'm looking forward to it.
EOF!
Top comments (2)
Bloggers are blogging about the newest and latest mainly for marketing-purposes. If they're the first one to write about something, they might get more impressions and a better ranking, or even get on HN. It has nothing to do with the quality of the subject. There's too little time to learn shit on spec. I think it's useful to know what problem the new things solve, so you can learn it properly when it arrives.
Great perspective and thought. I see what you mean and agree with what you're saying.
Have a nice one!