| > Never jump on the new thing. Always lean toward the simple thing. Always prefer tools closer to your core competencies. You can attack this problem from different angles. You can either refrain from using new tools OR you can widen your core competencies. I work ~30h a week. The next 50h I spend doing my hobby thing, which is learning and using new - and old, as there are many forgotten tools which give you an edge over whatever is considered mainstream - tools in various areas. I'm a pathological case of a generalist, but even I have one or two things I specialize in. Now, I did this for the last 10 years. The ratio of work vs. tech exploration was not always that favourable, but I kept doing this basically throughout the last decade. What I ended with is a skill that lets me very easily learn, understand and modify or fix new tools, be it languages, frameworks or libraries (among other things, ofc). So, in principle, I should have a vast choice of tools accessible to me. But it doesn't work at all, because even if my project is currently being written by me only, it will be maintained by some other person in the future. And that person is almost guaranteed not to know any of the tools I decided to use, despite them being the best tools for the job. Well, it looks like I'm just venting my frustration here, so please don't mind me. :) |