[bsenftner]

I started professionally developing in '82. I'm 52 now. A major part of being an engineer is filtering out the noise generated by the marketing arms of our industry. As tech development grew, the number of available tools and platforms exploded, with an exponential growth in the marketing noise generated by all these tools trying succeed.

Since web development "matured", the number of disposable tools and the hype machine surrounding them has convinced a good population of programmers (who seem to be mostly young) that they are "not cool" if they are using older tool chains.

I see so many 20 and 30 something developers caught up trying new frameworks, trying new languages, and experimenting with their dev setup WHILE ON A PAYING CLIENT'S JOB, basically just fucking over their productivity, and needlessly generating self-stress.

I am super-uber productive. I am lead developer of 3 libraries, and 2 of the 3 flagship products of the facial recognition company I work. My background includes VFX production as a developer and digital artist for 9 major release feature films, lead 3D game console developer for 15 years, and OS developer of the original PlayStation. Through ALL that, I still use the same "make" I used back in the 80's, I hand write my make files, just give me a text editor and a compiler. That is ALL I need, that and to be left alone.

No slack/chat app bullshit, no trying out of tools, just doing the job with the tools I know very well. Delivering early, or over delivering on time, with 100% certainty of what I'm delivering because I know the libs and tool chain from years of experience with them.

[dpweb]

I’d second that, for web devs too, a text editor is all you need.

After 20+ years but I try out most new tools. Just in case it turns out to be something great.

In webdev in 20 years Id say ONLY Github/Git, and the cloud Linux VPS, have met the standard of Great Adds to the toolchain.

[dvddgld]

React w/ Babel is undoubtably over hyped and yet surely its still a fairly significant value add over vanilla JS (when applicable) for how simple it can make state management and putting together UI.

Evergreen browsers, ES6 and etc are also make development significantly smoother in my experience, and I didn't even experience much before IE9.

[dang]

Could you please not use allcaps for emphasis in HN comments?

This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

[muzani]

I've been developing Android apps for 6 years. The tools from now to back then have gotten better, namely Kotlin, which lets us write the same thing with 30% less lines of code and less cognitive load.

However, I see that the "minimum" work has greatly increased. What was once 1 file for a screen now becomes 4-5 files and a folder.

While we once had 30 lines and 5 minutes to parse a JSON file, we now use an external library, with about 30 minutes to create a POJO for it. The new methodologies make API changes more costly too.

The added complexity also multiplies the damage from bugs, rushed schedules, team members dropping out, cost of documentation, and so on.

Most of these new tools are only useful if you want to keep on adding more engineers and still have something for them all to do. But for the most part, I feel that they just regulate productivity - keep everyone at roughly the same productivity, even if it means crippling someone from being 10x more productive.

[usaphp]

the website which you list to be ceo of is having some certificate issues: www.3D-Avatar-Store.com

[bsenftner]

The 3D Avatar Store closed 3 years ago. I still own the domain, but there is nothing at it, so the error you get is a default.