My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

My fellow dev often laugh when I tell them that instead of looking at all the long dead techs that are not useful to me anymore, my way to feel good is to look back at all the long dead techs that I didn't bother to learn.

And, geez, is the graveyard huge.

> Java Applets were also a big thing once upon a time. They were slow, and having the correct version of Java installed on your computer was always a mess.

Java applets were never that big. They didn't work very well (for the reason you mention) and weren't ubiquitous. They also nearly all looked like shit.

But Java isn't disappearing anytime soon. Java is huge and it'll have a legacy dwarfing COBOL big big times. Many may not find Java sexy but the JVM is one heck of a serious piece of tech, with amazing tooling available.

And most devs hating on Java are using an IDE written mainly in Java (all the JetBrains ones): the irony of that one gives me the giggles.

Did anyone in the mid to late nineties / early 2000s really discover Java and Java applets and thought: "Java applets is the tech that'll catch on, I'll invest in that" and not invest in Java itself? To me Java was the obvious winner (not that it was that great but it was clear to me Sun was on to something). And, well, compared to the other dead tech, at least if you learned Java applets you got to learn Java too so it's not all lost.

Sometimes I think that this is just the nature of software development. Most of the stuff I build is built to solve an immediate business problem. It probably lasts 5/10 years and then someone rewrites it in a new language, or more often the task isn’t relevant anymore so the code gets deleted.

I find myself thinking that maybe if I’d been in civil engineering or something then I’d be building stuff that lasts, but speaking to people who’ve worked a long time in construction has taught me that it’s the same there. Most of the buildings that go up, come down again in a few decades once regulations/fashions change or the new owner of the site wants something else.

Every so often something like a Cathedral gets built, and those get built to last. But most people don’t get to work on those. If there’s a software equivalent of a Cathedral then I still haven’t found it.

In general, looking back at old code I wrote it seems my solutions were better when I was more naive / less experienced, as I would often go for the immediately obvious and simple solution (which is the right one in 90 % of cases). Working many years in software development and reading HN seems to have made me more insecure regarding software, as I tend to over-engineer systems and constantly doubt / second-guess my technical decisions. So one thing I'm actively trying to do is to go back to using simpler approaches again, and caring less about perfect code.

No, it's just a fucking product you made. The fact it has to be maintained doesn't mean it is "debt", it's just like any other asset.

You don't get to your car and think "that's technical debt". There is nothing technical about it. It's a tool with maintenance needs.

The difference is choosing worse now to get it faster, that's technical debt.

Yes, biased old man that saw 30 years of code get replaced with the latest "thing that kind of works like the old thing, but not really as good, but we have to do it to keep up with technology or we'll have debt". I've seen old VB6 apps fulfill a business need just as well as anything written in a full LAMP stack that takes a team to implement. (not that I'd ever use VB6, but hey, it did a job).

Take me out back of the shed and end it quick while I'm hunched over programming something cool.

* Simple, but reliable file formats: My old photos collection is 25 years old (jpeg) and I still look at them occasionally.

* My influxdb/grafana/openhab setup is now 8 years old and has been operational with only minimal hickups.

* Some home automation scripts I wrote have endured for 8 years now.

* My Linux/Unix knowledge is 26 years old (although much has changed since Slackware).

* My C and C++ programming language knowledge is 28 years old (although I rarely use it anymore, because of Rust). Occasionally it is useful during debugging performance problems in kernels.

* My knowledge of distributed systems (stuff like leader election, distributed and centralised algorithms) is 15 years old. It is still very relevant to understand both existing systems and to evaluate new systems.

It is crucial to distinguish the knowledge that stands the test of time from the fleeting trends. And finally then there are the non-technical skills, which pay off even more. Effective communication, negotiation skills, organisational finesse, inspirational leadership, adept management... These are the true constants that support us during our professional life.

CTO's change. They started replacing it with a "proper" ERP system around the time I left and it's been nearly 6 years of pain. Joel spaketh: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

(As usual: of course you can break the rule, but first deeply understand the risk you're taking.)

20 years from now, C will probably still be a core language in its niche.

  I met a traveller from an antique land,
  Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
  Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
  Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
  And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
  Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
  Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
  The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
  And on the pedestal, these words appear:
  My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
  Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
  Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
  Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
  The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

The small amount of code that's useful for years or decades needs to be built on a stable foundation and with few dependencies. This probably matters a lot more than the code being a bit messy. It should require as little maintenance as possible.

I have two pieces of PHP code I wrote more than 10 years ago, in PHP 5.1, that I still use. Both are messy, one is outright horrible, but they have no dependencies (the horrible one optionally depends on GeSHi, but there's a runtime check for its presence and has a "degraded" mode for when it's not there). They work and are relatively bug-free (the horrible one in particular is battle-tested). I didn't have much to do to run them on PHP 8.2. A few superficial fixes that were actual issues (and took half an hour to fix). By the way, I can't figure out how PHP 5 was even able to run this code. You could have mandatory parameters after ones with default values. Yuk.

First I wrote single threaded code code with automatic memory management, then single threaded synchronous with manual memory management, then synchronous multi-threaded, then async, and then async lock free.

Now I am writing async lock free, and the compiler is helping me prove it is data-race-free and memory safe.

Each time I rewrite this stuff, someone hands me 6-7 figures. This is awesome.

Rails is kicking ass. A huge number of people are coming back from bloated JS frameworks to realize that Rails just keeps getting better every year.

Hotwire and similar technologies make the argument for SPAs look very questionable.

And let's not forget where we are; over 75% of the raw gross value created by YC-backed companies use Rails. So it seems like Rails is only popular with successful startups.

C was the 2nd language I learned and I'm still using it. The big surprise for me has been javascript - it's so...bad it became good or at least ubiquitous.

The POSIX standards, flawed as they may be, have incredible staying power. These standards run our phones and embedded, supercomputers, current Apple workstations, game consoles, and are significant in many other places.

Microsoft itself implemented POSIX in Windows from the beginning (likely recognizing it's importance as the former vendor of Xenix), and while this has waxed and waned, running the "wsl.exe -l -o" command on modern Windows will catalog Ubuntu, Kali, and Oracle Linux that are not Linux, but serviced by the Windows kernel's POSIX layer under WSL1.

Applications that implement or greatly enhance POSIX have staying power.

Those who seek code longevity would do well to study it.

I'm sure some not insignificant parts of Windows, Linux, tools, libraries, browsers etc. etc. are fairly old code that just keeps working .. perhaps with fixes and improvements.

Good code lasts a long time. Technical debt is something you are continuously paying "interest" on. Just like any debt, sometimes it's a good thing and sometimes it's a bad thing.

I think we've done ourselves a very big disservice as an industry by focusing on this boogeyman.

Products don't become technical debt, they merely depreciate along with any aassociated technical debt. This is why I don't like the term technical debt: it implies something that must be paid back. But you don't have to pay back the "debt" on product that will be completely replaced anyway.

When I have a long list of todo items to perfect my work for a client, and then they run out of money for the whole project and end my contract. I don't say "oh no, now I'll never dot those i's and cross those t's!" I say "yay, I will cross everything off my todo list forever."

Code, most code, will eventually turn into some sort of sanitised applied maths corpus (with a heavy overlay of "AI" analytical tools).

In applied mathematics you have cultural obsolescence (stuff that we no longer find interesting or relevant, like an asymptotic formula for the Airy function [0]) but the corpus is intrinsically add-only. Once something is solved it does not have be solved again. Its essence is eternal, so to speak.

Think about code development in such as mature state. It will mostly work by pulling together (using AI prompts) logical units from the future version of Rosetta [1].

When we get to that stage it will be hard to add something truly new. Just like it takes a long incubation and a PhD to add some marginal new thing to applied mathematics, it will take effectively trained applied mathematicians to add something minor to the evolving code corpus.

Coding for the common folk will be mostly compositing. It might be productive and even fun, but not quite the same.

We lived through a period of widespread democratization of development. Cherish the freedom of reinventing the wheel in countless flawed ways :-)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airy_function

[1] https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Rosetta_Code

I have worked in the field of AI for 40 years, and we have had a huge trash heap of technologies that ended up being useless except for lessons learned from failure.

I have always been motivated to work for just two reasons: supporting myself and my family, and learning and using new tech. The great fun is in learning new things. That said, sometimes there is good short term work supporting old tech that companies still want to use.

Our cathedrals are surely [L,U]inux and the C programming language, HTML has done pretty well too.

"Grandfather, what did you spend your life on?"

"I made people click ads. Don't worry, it's all technical debt or deprecated now ..."

I generally think of "fad" tech as frameworks and ecosystems that are built around a commercial interest or novel idea. They often fail to overcome network effects. And this leads them into obscurity to await deprecation.

There's a lot of churn that happens in the frothy red waters of "trying to make programming easier/faster/accessible-to-non-programmers".

And we're not so great at maintaining our legacy, the state of the art, the pedagogy and history of our science. Over a twenty-plus year career I've seen people re-invent solutions to the same problems over and over. Each time it's a revolution. You don't want to dishearten the young and eager but at the same time seeing them run into the same problems, learning the same conclusions, etc means we've not been doing a great job at teaching and mentoring and all that.

MS Visual Basic 6, MS ActiveX, MS Silverlight, MS Visual Foxpro, MS C# .NET Compact Framework, MS ASP.NET WebForms, MS ASP.NET MVC, MS Windows Communication Foundation...

I think there common is a theme there. But shhh, don't tell him.

# Job 1 (3 yrs)

  - Worked on around three products, all shut down, code probably lives in some SVN archive.
  - Learnt advanced JS, PHP, MySQL, Photoshop, jQuery etc (skills mostly relevant)

  - Project never launched, code never saw the light of the day. Probably lives in some Git archive.
  - Learnt a few in-house frameworks (irrelevant) but also leant Git (relevant)

  - Worked on several products, the biggest one is still active and seeing millions of users weekly. Rest got shut down and live in a Git repo.
  - Learnt about some inhouse frameworks (irrelevant). React, React Native (skills still relevant)

  - Actively working
  - Learnt Vue (skills still relevant)

I would argue that any apps written in Objective C are probably technical debt now"

I switched to Swift a few years ago after many years of obj-c, at first I was reluctant as there were still many things I liked about obj-c but Swift won me over. Thought I would never touch obj-c much until I had to integrate a cpp library, I can't believe how much I forgot in such a short time. It was interesting to find out how to structure the obj-c code to translate nicely to swift though.

visual basic, asp, coldfusion, foxpro, activex, flash, and silverlight, windows ce, asp.net, webforms? proprietary, proprietary, proprietary, proprietary, proprietary, proprietary, proprietary, and proprietary

and mostly pretty dead as a result

how about the non-proprietary things in the list? html, css, js, fortran, java, ruby, and rails are all just about as alive as they were 10 or 20 years ago, if not more so, except that rails didn't exist then

the exceptions are perl, objective-c, and the js frameworks. perl, ember, and backbone aren't going to disappear anytime soon but they will likely continue to stagnate. but unlike silverlight or windows ce, you can probably run your perl and backbone and angular and react and swift code 10 or 20 or 30 years from now on whatever platform people like then

unless the platform is centrally controlled by an owner who forbids it, so try to avoid platforms like that

(java applets were already dead 20 years ago, and soap sucked from the beginning, so these examples are out of place)

there is certain knowledge with a very limited half-life. but hopefully you aren't spending most of your time learning react apis or wasm instructions or editor keystrokes or chromium bugs, but rather general principles that transfer across domains. algorithms, reasoning, type theory, math, writing skills, hierarchical decomposition, scientific debugging, generative testing, heuristic search, that kind of thing. a lot of that stuff goes back before computing

and most code has an even shorter lifespan than the knowledge we use to build it. which is as it should be: most code is written to solve a problem that won't last decades or even years, but it's still profitable for companies to have it written. modifying a big system is harder than modifying a small one, so it's better to maintain just the code you need for today's problems. writing code and throwing it away is mostly fine

still, i've spent my career on free-software tools, and their half-life seems to be a lot longer, about 25 years. i reviewed some of the stuff i'm using right now in a comment on here 10 days ago, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35829663

i know a guy whose preferred programming editor is ex. the non-full-screen version of vi

Ruby is the 8th most popular programming language. Ahead of C, C#, and a bunch of "cool" languages like Scala, Kotlin, and Rust.

Source: https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pull_requests/2023/1

Remember Crystal Reports? Oh god, the pain. The pain.

OSS tends to have a much longer relevant shelf-life and experience with it, especially internals remain highly transferable skills.

My work in and around Apache and CNCF ecosystems has been the only code I have written that truly endures in a good way rather than an ossified and decrepit legacy way.

My dream retirement job is to work at a tax agency, like CRA or IRS, and help maintain their mountain of COBOL. I don't know COBOL, I don't know the ecosystem around it, but I absolutely know that I would love to learn it.

My first job was in a similar environment, supporting a homegrown application (which had grown out of a long-defunct commercial application) running on a Pick-style database system (UniVerse). The whole thing could trace its roots back to a Prime mainframe. Reading the code, especially the older stuff, was such an adventure.

ScarletDME[0] is seriously scratching the itch to play in this world.

[0] https://github.com/geneb/ScarletDME

The barnacle did provide more lifetime business value after all.

Utilizing the Lindy Effect to my benefit, I've been able to almost entirely avoid the typical framework frustrations, such as breaking changes and abandoned dependencies.

Instead, I've been able to focus on features, figure out a good code style, and support nearly all mainstream or once-mainstream browsers. On the back-end, I'm working on the Windows install process, but on *nix it's fairly uniform across different flavors and lineages.

For those curious, it is Perl, text files, PGP, HTML, CSS, low-sugar JS, and a little bit of sh, Python and PHP for server glue. Now probably to include batch files...

- you solve said problem

- profit

- competitors catch up and hit the same problem

- 3rd party (or one of the 1st parties pivots) notices all of you have the same problem. implements solution to fix the generic version of the problem: a standard is born

- hubs appear that make it easy for your competitors to eat into your market share because they now use the 3rd party solution and are more agile.

- you can't integrate because your solution is not complying to the new "standard"

- rewrite is needed

(edit: I hate HN formatting)

How did technical debt become so bloated and meaningless? Isn't it "remaining half baked/incorrect code, known edge cases, bad/slow implementations, or even bugs due to constraints imposed on the engineering team"? How is dead technologies are imposed constraints?

Author is not talking about technical debt but experience that is not directly applicable anymore.

The typical thing some of us tried to avoid while others (or their employers) totally embraced these comfortable (advertised as productive and fast) and often proprietary tools. The contrasting would be HTML, JS, C/C++, all closer to the bare metal of their respective targets. Or Java and Python as the two that made the race in more complex but purely language levels, as Rust is doing right now. Java has gotten connected more and more to its typical business frameworks these days, so beware :)

Some of them died just with their platform as ObjC/Swift would die with Apple, Kotlin with Android these days.

It seems a split between language and environment/frameworks has proven to provide some stabilty at least.

Seldom (and funny) to see such a "consistent" list, though :) There might be something like "consulting work" as the recurring theme in it. As a product/system/platform developer one might have had (and would have been forced to) put more effort in selecting the tools for long term availability where they are not forced upon you by the platform or time-to-market considerations.

Sure, all code rots, frameworks and even languages come and go. That's not technical debt, to me, though.

Put another way, if everything is tech debt, then there's really no point to having the term at all.

Had the author invested in learning stuff like math, physics, cryptography, advanced data structures and algorithms, functional programming theory, 3d programming, compiler theory, database theory, etc...

None of it would be obsolete today, and all of it would be almost immediately applicable in any language that happens to be the flavor of the day at a given point in time.

Let that be a lesson to all of the folks who become extremely proficient in the latest react-like fad javascript framework: in 10 years time, all your knowledge will be useful for one thing: maintaining and patching old crumbling code piles that no one wants to touch.

Do yourself a favor instead and go learn timeless things that will still be completely relevant 20 years from now. Then spend a minimal amount of time learning how to apply it in whatever language/framework of the day is fashionable at your job.

C++ merrily carried my backend solutions over the same timeframe with the same results.

Same for C when writing firmware.

Same for JavaScript / HTML for browser based front ends.

In all of the above I used some domain specific libs but stayed away from big frameworks as those come and go pretty fast.

I consider neither as a tech debt as they let me concentrate on the product rather than dwell on what tech do I use. I've never felt inferior for not using this new and shiny doodad as I've always delivered superior products and that is what mattered for my clients.

Yes I had to program in whole bunch of other languages upon client requests but this was rather rare. I have good track record in creating new products from scratch and that is what my clients really want. They mostly do not care what I use for development.

So no. I do not feel that tech debt at all and I still play with other tech a little to stay current in case it is needed by client.

If you pick new technologies, don't be surprised that they will be quickly overridden by something else. Pick stable and boring frameworks and languages. I.e. lots of old Java Swing applications runs on today computers without recompilation.

Lisp on the side, plus the Unix cruft that goes with build systems: shell, awk, make, ...

I went through the language churn as a kid. BASIC, assembly languages, Pascal, Modula-2. Studying CS pulled me into C world; all the upper level coursework at that time was systems programming in C on Unix, whether it be compilers, networking, distributed systems, operating systems or computer graphics or what have you.

I didn't think I'd be cranking out C for another 30 years after that, but I also didn't think of any reasons I wouldn't be.

Not everything I worked on is around; but the skills left behind are entirely relevant. There is hardly any technique I ever used that is inapplicable.

On the other hand I'm currently working on Android, where everything seems to be obsolete within a year...

Hardly.

> What once made it unique is now available in other languages.

Sure, yay open source.

You still can't get as much out of the box with one CLI command for a new rails app in node.js. I would love to be corrected on this.

Still works and the codebase is still being incrementally updated ~20 years in.

Stint with Laravel, which was a huge task to add, and an even huger task to eventually remove; After an update by Laravel that was not backwards compatible made us rethink the cost/value.

Javascript on the frontend, with no libraries as critical infra except for HTMX.

Was once a contributor to Mootools; now use quite a bit of homegrown funcs, and use libraries for spot instances (Alpine, Uppy, QuillJS - all of which are written modular with intention to be traded out.)

MySQL and eventually Postgres. "NoSQL" only when it was added (as JSONB) to Postgres.

All of those years of coding are an asset, not a liability.

Don't go chasing the new and shiny, it doesn't last. (And steer clear of Web3, will ya?)

EDIT: We use Tailwind - and time will tell if that is a mistake.

I beg to differ. There are 1000+ Rails developers actively looking for work on railsdevs.com

- SQL - Terminal - OO programming travelled pretty well from C#/Java to Objective-C to Swift

Then there's stuff that is still called the same but completely unrecognizable compared to the time I was good at it like HTML / JS / CSS

1. If the codebase would still work on a "dead platform", but you are targeting something new, you are chasing after hype, to some degree.

2. If the code involves significant data entry, you probably want to leverage a spreadsheet, because eventually you will want to edit something tabular and also make charts and reports. The things "dashboards" do are also very reasonable to do from inside a spreadsheet - make a tiny shim to pipe in some data, and then make the dashboard frontend using all the built-in goodies.

3. If the code is mostly about making custom UI, you are on the path to saleable application software, or at minimum, a tech demo that people will talk about.

C is not deprecated. Maybe in a 100 years it will be, but it seems unlikely.

It's very rare to find someone who has C as their favourite language, but it's incredibly persistent.

C is the opposite of the latest JS framework.

I regularly fix bugs in open source, where when checking when the bug was introduced the trail often runs cold in the mid to early 90s, as it predates that project's use of source control.

But yeah, if you have a 20 year career of following what is clearly the latest fad, then you'll have that experience.

Java applets were never "big". They were a fad, and promise of big. But they always sucked, even by the standards at the time.

One day the apps (products) may themselves become technical debt, but that is not the fault of the language they were written in.

I have heard this with great emotion for at least 6 years now and nothing. It’s starting to look like bitcoin: all these dreams and ideals that come to nothing in practice but a Ponzi scheme.

The funny thing is that it clearly indicates nobody know what they are doing. People advocating for WASM want DOM bindings because the DOM is great and JavaScript is the great evil. Most people who actually write JavaScript professionally feel equally about the DOM, a great evil, and so they are completely reliant on some massive framework to justify the their existence.

Sorta like how LISP might be the "Guns & Roses" of coding; Not everyone like it, but in their hearts they know it has greatness on some level. And no one can argue with their staying power :D

I guess I don't particularly care if my code lives on or not. I build something. It's hopefully useful for others or myself for some period of time, then its gone.

It's just lines I've written. Why would that be more important than other lines I've written? In other careers I never thought about how my work was eventually going to be forgotten. That's just how life goes.

In my career I've gone through so many tech stacks, most of which are dead or dying today. A lot of my projects you could today replace with a couple API calls or an AWS product.

At least I like to think I learnt a few things along the way that make me a better developer, I never know what to say when recruiters or interviewers ask me about my tech stack experience expecting some sort of very specific answer – to me it makes as much sense as asking whether I have firefox experience, or just chrome.

Javascript is an ECMA standard. I'll just do the JSDoc hack and cheer for TC39 rather than waste my time with a technology that's great for now but will probably end up being technical debt.

Think of how little somebody who uses C, bash, vim, and javascript has had to adapt in the past several decades, all because they avoided technologies where the buck stops with a community rather than a corporation.

Corporations are cool and all. I'm not a dirty hippie. But at the end of the day they don't make money when things don't change.

Do walled gardens not last as long I wonder?

ALL of your code will be dead in a few years. The company goes under, or some punk CTO comes in and commands a "full rewrite ASAP!". Even with normal evolution and refactoring, your original work will be unrecognizable.

Either way, you take experience and friendships from your employment, you are not going to be the Picasso of software engineering.

My favorite job -- to refactor something old. If only businesses wanted to pay for it.

If it's that bad in hardware land I don't feel so bad about this virtual detritus we software people spew. At least it's cheap, eh?

Other than that, yeah, most of what I’ve made is no longer used by any significant number of people.

Not sure if there’s any wisdom to draw from this anecdote, but I did spend a lot of cycles in trying to perfect that library!

One exception: I think the jq tool could stay viable, if it made it into a standard toolset. It solves a defined problem.

> Basic, Silverlight, ColdFusion, asp...

I'd add > Lingo, Flash

Basically if Microsoft, Adobe or any other entrenched player make it easy for you to develop in it and they offer the only Dev stack then its probably going to die quickly.

Counter case, apple seems to be doing fine with swift. So I might be wrong here.

The whole project will eventually disappear in history in favour of a rewrite which is around since before the pandemic.

That would probably include the lions' share of system code in the Apple OS ecosystem.

I'll bet a lot of it hearkens back to the NextStep days.

Since it is a UNIX OS (all of the OSes), then there's plenty of good ol' ANSI C, as well.

I'm almost positive that every AAA app is still a ObjC BoM (Ball of Mud).

> Over time, you can see how almost everything you create gets scrapped and replaced for various reasons or is now based on old technology.

Is this problem fixable by using some great technologies? React code does not rot and Common Lisp applications are famous as having the most time without getting rot among other programming languages.

The underlying concepts stay the same. Your own experience is much improved.

Some old technology gets replaced? I celebrate the demise of Flash.

I am not Flash or even a Flash developer. I am a software developer.

I am a bit sad Dlang is not more used? Yes, I am. But I am not a "Dlang" developer.

Tying yourself to some technology seems self limiting.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. Fallen out of fashion perhaps, but still very stable, easy work with, predictable and with pretty clear best practices that don't change every three months.

I am glad I am not the only one who hit this roadblock with Elasticsearch. It felt like always trying to play catch up.

this is probably the most damning thing about the field. We don't invest in developers, so why would they invest in the business?

I mean, I don't like it but...

Contrary to the author, for me, over my entire career, I feel like I have been relatively incredibly lucky with my choices of 1) What (web) technologies to invest lots of time into, and 2) Therefore what tools I use in my own projects and at companies I have worked for.

I think that 50% of the reason is down to when I was born and therefore when I started my software engineering career (for example, therefore avoiding lots of bad alleyways that web dev went down), and 50% was just common sense (realizing early-on that X tool was obviously going to be superior to Y tool).

1. I was fortunate enough to be born at a time such that I just about missed the AngularJS --> Angular2 betrayal + debacle.

2. I realized, through playing around with the Angular2 beta around 2014 (IIRC), that it was going to be inferior to React. I remember that at the time React was this tiny thing that had existed for around a year or so, but it was clearly conceptually superior, with more talented Facebook developers behind it vs the Google developers behind the early Angular2.

Not to be too disparaging or direspectful, but at least in the early days, it felt like Angular2 was made by a team of your usual C++ Google engineers who didn't have a lot of experience with web dev. Just being honest here...

This lead me to A) selecting React for my personal projects, and B) advising to pick React at companies I worked for. This meant that there are React codebases that I contributed to ~8 years ago that are still active at companies today.

3. Through sheer luck, I started my true web dev career after the "random crazy insecure web technologies" era such as Flash, Java applets, and all that nonsense.

4. Through sheer luck, I started my true web dev career shortly after Typescript was created, and I just happened to use a framework (now non-existent) which used it, co-introducing it to me in ~2014. This meant that I have been able to create relatively maintainable Typescript codebases, mostly avoiding creating any quick-to-deprecate JS mess-heaps.

There are a couple more examples, but I think that captures why I feel so lucky. I feel bad for the engineers that, through a combination of bad luck (time born, time entering the field, etc.) and lack of foresight, were led down paths causing them to invest a tonne of time into technologies that were just never going to be around for the long-run.

My time will likely come where my luck runs out, and I end up investing a tonne of time into some nonsense tech that initially seems solid but ends up rubbish for whatever reason, but for now, I'm quite pleased :)

It's pretty frustrating. I keep trying to do courses to keep my skills up-to-date, but it doesn't matter. Those courses by themselves are already outdated a year later. The only things that have been solid in my career, is the CS knowledge and theoretical knowledge from books like 'designing data intensive applications'. That stuff rarely changes. The rest is like waves in a sea. They come and go.

Paint that shed.