The majority of developers I’ve worked with or met have fallen into a phase of burnout. It’s tiring keeping up with every JavaScript framework that’s “the new standard”. This of course changes every 6 months, and senior developers know how to navigate these trends.
There’s not many careers that change as frequently as web development, and even fewer that require constant education to stay “relevant”. It can be exaughsting keeping up, always learning a new skill.
Early in my career, I was eager to jump into every new trend, scrolling twitter ready to find the hot framework or library. But ten years in, I know these trends don’t always tend to last and I’m hesitant to develop in anything trendy.
Time and time again, I’ve seen the rise of a “industry standard” that trends towards being bad practice only six months later. Remember Micro-services, cloud based IDEs, and service buses?
There’s only so many iterations of a “revolutionary new trend” that actually stick, and keeping up with them can be exhausting. We’re taught early in our careers to soak up information like a sponge, listening to the industry leaders.
However, there’s a breaking point that most senior developers have reached.
Why are we reimagining the wheel, when we’ve solved this problem thousands of times? Is this framework going to be maintained in 2 years when there’s a critical bug? Will I be able to find developers with experience in this technology a year from now?
It’s a double edged sword. We’re trained to use the latest technology and practices, but we know that trends come and go.
How do we know if a trend is here to stay? Fuck if I know. Keep guessing like the rest of us, but don’t feel bad if you start to get less excited about the trends.
I mean, PHP has been “dead” for the past 5 years right?
Brandon O'Hara
Montana based web developer specializing in creating web applications in Laravel, VueJS and Angular. Currently overseeing engineering at Trak Software as Chief Technology Officer, building a web application to simplify and streamline communication in sponsorship activation and management.