In 2017, I met modern frontend. In a few hectic months, I had to learn AngularJS, Gulp, Grunt, and some CSS improvement system (LESS or Sass or something). Then I moved on to Angular and worked with it for a couple of years. For the first time, it actually started to feel worth it. But what a churn in the beginning. Angular 2, 4, 5, 6, and I think up to 9 all dropped while I was still working with it.

Since then, I’ve mostly worked with React, which is blissfully productive and unexciting in the best way possible as long as we prevent people from pulling in CV-padding material like Redux.

Over the past few years, I’ve been hired into places where I’m once again upgrading codebases written in AngularJS (yep, it still exists), Elm, and jQuery. Everything gets rewritten to React, and after that we can hire people right out of school to maintain it (as long as we keep the CV-padding libraries out of it).

I guess this is a long-winded way of saying: even if you’ve been lucky enough to work in a place where people made good technical decisions years ago, and work in a place that treat their devs well enough that someone who still remembers how it works cares to work there —not everyone’s that lucky.