What javascript framework should we focus on?

Being the first ever Group CTO in a growing consultancy firm (which is hard in itself, but more on that in a later post) is a lot of fun but most of the time I find myself questioning what I should and what I shouldn't worry about.

My daughter trying out a new framework

Enter two colleagues from one of our offices, asking me my opinion on what javascript framework is best for all web development throughout Incentro.

Even though I'd love to help them out, I honestly could not care less. And I'll try to explain why you shouldn't care either.

There are three reasons why you shouldn't care which frontend technology is being used:

1. It's short lived, your choice doesn't matter. Developers will tell you it's absolutely necessary to upgrade AngularJS to Angular 7 because in a year or two from now no (new) developer will understand AngularJS. This is most probably true, but the same developer will tell you in a year you should switch to VueJS because all the cool kids use it.
2. The impact of your choice is limited. Provided you also live in 2019 and you know your application should not be monolithic by any means, your frontend is loosely coupled, your backend is headless and they shouldn't affect each other. Just pick one.
3. There are just too much factors involved. Does your CI/CD process support all frontend frameworks? (It should). Does your backend application (if out-of-the-box) support anything? There's just no way you can pick one frontend technology or framework for your entire organisation. At least not for a consultancy firm.

There's a huge upside to this though: your developers can pick. They get to experiment with new stuff, they can make each other enthusiastic and they can keep up with the latest and greatest. Not caring lets your developers do their own thing. It thrives innovation throughout your company and it has no downside. Stop caring now…