@timbray

I particularly like this take on the return to simpler, known to work, technologies:

> "It will, of course, be overdone. Because minimalism being hyped is still... hype."

I worked in the tech industry from the early eighties until last year, when I retired (the second time) and I can confidently tell you there are two kinds of people who fall for hype: developers and managers.

But, speaking as the first kind, it's the second kind who cause all the damage when they do.

@timbray

I generally agree with the main theme of the article, but I have some problems with

> I was lucky to learn this lesson very early in my career: there is no silver bullet, any single tool, …

Yes, but. It is very interesting to me how this doesn't seem to be true about our tools. There is no endless numbers of VCS systems and all non-git seem to be more or less dead. There are two big C compilers, but other one was made alive only by the tremendous effort of Apple. Etc.

@timbray
Making it harder often means making it more interesting. 🤔

@timbray Excellent. Really enjoyed that.

@timbray Spot on. Shame hype cycles take so long to dissipate. 5-10 years?

@timbray oh that article hits so many hyped things I've already managed to forget. Ignorance was bliss...

@timbray
Great but painful article

@timbray @lisamelton Nice article. Another issue is when your new developers latch on to the newest fad not for the good of the company but to position themselves for their next job.

Disclaimer: I've been doing a little XSLT for the past 15 years. Every time I have to update an XSLT I remember that I would prefer hitting my head against the wall.

@timbray This is fine but.i never understand why people think the moral of the story is "use the right tool for the job!"

The moral is "some tools are rubbish but have a lot of hype, avoid".

@timbray #fashernisa and #geekproblem are good hashtags for this.

@timbray Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea máxima culpa.

@timbray
That's pretty much the past 20 years in one depressing nutshell.

Excellent writeup. Wish the author had an RSS feed...

@timbray i do remember the xml years, we really did use it for everything

and the craziest thing was: nobody actually understood xml

like REALLY understood it

the reason i know this is that i then went on to work with xml for real, building a complex document management system with multiple namespaces, where xml was absolutely the legitimate and correct choice of technology

and that's when i really learned all the ins and outs of it and why it was a terrible choice for almost anything else

@timbray we pretty much stuck to the same backend stack for 15 years and going at my last job. It was boring but it mostly worked for us going from basement start up to serving hundreds of utility companies around the globe. It did however make hiring difficult as we never used the hot new tools.

@timbray That was a "comforting" read. It's another person eloquently explaining what I have learned to be true over decades of writing software. It's nice to have that confirmation that others have reached the same conclusions as you.

@timbray Back in web dev class some years ago: "You have to learn React!" "No, Angular is better!" Six months later: "React is terrible, you need to learn Vue."

@timbray XML *is* pretty cool, though 😝

I feel like something this article doesn't bring to the forefront enough is that these hype waves do leave genuinely valuable tech in their wake, despite almost never being the revolution they claim to be. XML, MongoDB/NoSQL, microservice architecture, and machine learning are all great tools with important use cases. It's good to take a step back from the hype, but overcorrecting can lead to project/business failure just the same.

@timbray this resonates with me. I never understood why people were wilfully making things harder for themselves... But nowadays I think it's either ignorance (everybody is using it, so it can't be bad) or boredom (I've built this stack a thousand times, how can I make it more interesting, there's got to be a better way). 😅

@timbray very timely sanity check as I refactor an old PHP project and keep thinking "maybe I should just rebuilt it in like nuxt.js or something..."
Nooope. :D
Thanks for the share 🙏🏼

@timbray I stopped coding professionally when this BS started (JS frameworks out the arse, and Zend)

@timbray

>Of course, all that stuff had terrible accessibility, SEO and first-rendering time issues, leading to the rise of Server-Side Rendering, aka CGI with extra steps.

Yep. Painful extra steps. So many extra steps that you wonder why you didn't just use a proper server-side framework to start with.

@timbray Worth the read just for the list of Flux implementations alone. I was _sure_ they were just riffing toward the end...until they linked to evidence. 👀