Prototypes, Bugs and Emotions

From a front-end engineering perspective, your code gets recycled more often than your back-end counterpart. You write this scalable, performant piece of code that you see being sunset, redesigned or re-architected.

Early on, I used to be attached to my code and felt sad when it went away. But over the years I have learnt not to do so. Although, I do ponder on why changes happen.

Some of the more common themes that I have come across are,

1. Old design prejudice. The reaction to a design is prejudiced by another design that precedes it. Every time a new design for a page or a module is presented, more often than not people in the room like it and praise it. This is because they are implicitly comparing it to the current design in use.
2. “What we think is different than what they think”. User feedback plays a huge role in pivoting, redesigning the product.
3. Technology habits of users change. They might start using mobile phones more. Some countries skipped the whole email game and went to text messaging.
4. Technology changes. Adobe Flash was a hugely popular technology. Now its obsolete. There are newer frameworks and libraries that are introduced. From backbone to ember to the next thing.
5. The Mental model of users change. Users’ minds are constantly getting trained by yours and other products out there.

“Code like it will never get thrown out, but don’t get attached to it.”