I don't even mind the keeping-up part. What I don't understand is how anybody keeps the code base reasonably up to date. I want to build something that lasts.
I was talking to somebody at a place where they're throwing away a big custom code base in favor of gluing together a bunch of aaS stuff. Four years ago, the system was cutting edge. Then they had a big round of layoffs, and they only now can afford to do new work again. One of the big factors in the decision was just the cost of getting everything up to date. There was a bunch of failed flavor-of-the-week stuff that needed to be rewritten. There was a bunch of technical debt from using cutting edge stuff (e.g., library versions pinned to particular GitHub hashes, forks of libraries to get that one feature or work around that one bug). And there was just the proliferation of different technologies picked because they were the "best" for the local problem, but definitely not the best when you account for operations and maintenance cost.
I'm hoping that the roulette wheel eventually stops spinning and the JS world settles on something, anything where I can be confident that somebody can come back a couple of years later and be able to extend it without having to throw everything out.
I was talking to somebody at a place where they're throwing away a big custom code base in favor of gluing together a bunch of aaS stuff. Four years ago, the system was cutting edge. Then they had a big round of layoffs, and they only now can afford to do new work again. One of the big factors in the decision was just the cost of getting everything up to date. There was a bunch of failed flavor-of-the-week stuff that needed to be rewritten. There was a bunch of technical debt from using cutting edge stuff (e.g., library versions pinned to particular GitHub hashes, forks of libraries to get that one feature or work around that one bug). And there was just the proliferation of different technologies picked because they were the "best" for the local problem, but definitely not the best when you account for operations and maintenance cost.
I'm hoping that the roulette wheel eventually stops spinning and the JS world settles on something, anything where I can be confident that somebody can come back a couple of years later and be able to extend it without having to throw everything out.