| As far as staying up to date on technology, I am heavily in favor of using boring technology (see http://boringtechnology.club) for my own projects. The biggest consideration for me is, will this tech still be around in 5 years, and will it have required me to do a full scale rewrite or massive breaking changes upgrade? I've gotten a lot of mileage out of Django for that reason, as even with the Python 2-3 thing, Django has been very stable compared to a lot of web stacks I've seen. It's 15 years old, and I fully expect it to still be around in another 15 years. React was being adopted by companies when it was still at version 0.12, and while it did end up staying around, it was not guaranteed. I would have been hesitant to use it at least until v1.0, and probably would rather have waited until v2.0. Now React is the frontrunner and unlikely to go anywhere. They've also maintained backwards compatibility mostly from what I've seen, as Facebook has 180,000 or whatever odd components they don't want to rewrite. I wouldn't use Elixir/Phoenix currently, unless it was extremely helpful to the project, just because it's a less mature technology. It sounds like a wonderful ecosystem, but if I'm making a business decision, risk is what I'm wanting to minimize. This is the biggest reason I was sad that VueJS seems to be flirting with a large breaking change. I had thought Evan originally said they _wouldn't_ be pulling an Angular 1 to 2 rewrite the whole framework, and though this doesn't seem as bad, it still is a different way of doing things. You know what hasn't changed in 10 years? JQUERY! Ha! So as far as how I'd keep up to date, my answer is that I'd try to choose a preferred tech stack that is stable and try to get really good at it. Django has been the only full stack framework I've needed to learn in my 8 years of contracting, and that's worked well for me. |
This slide[0] really resonated with me.
[0] http://boringtechnology.club/#85