Sad state of XYZ — or What happens when you pick shiny new stuff

RDX
1 min readJan 13, 2016

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I recently had a chance to read https://medium.com/@wob/the-sad-state-of-web-development-1603a861d29f#.6dq6lppcn. All the author’s points are valid. But the summary is:

This is what happens when you pick shiny new stuff

The author says:

The web (specifically the Javascript/Node community) has created some of the most complicated, convoluted, over engineered tools ever conceived.

Want to take a peek at the “DevOps” world? New Infrastructure tools are coming and going out by the dozens. What was last year’s hot DevOps tool is this year’s dud. Hadoop is dead, long live Spark. Storm became legacy. Went from Postgres to MongoDB and back to Postgres . Containers are still going from Deis to Kubernetes to ECS to GCE to Mesos to Swarm. Shiny new “products” rain from the Cloud almost everyday. Want to know how complicated it is to build a single app? Lambda, DynamoDB, Kinesis, IoT, RedShift, API Gateway, Firehose, duh I’m not even scratching the surface.

So that original post, although long and full of real examples, was not about Javascript fatigue really. Its change fatigue. Let’s be clear, if you’re picking something new, you’re making a conscious choice to grow up with it. Either be strong enough to do that, or smart enough to avoid that. Change is inevitable, but learn to avoid the fanboys and don’t be one as well.

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RDX

Simpleton, CI/CD Platformer at goeuro.com, ex-ThoughtWorker, Full stack engineer, Hack Java/Node/Frontend/Ruby/Docker/OSS, Practice XP/KISS/Lean