Two Sentences About Getting Older and Working on the Web

Make a list of confusing things. Carve out some time every day to explore and practice on confusing things. Maybe an hour, or whatever time you can devote to this. Queue them up, like a reading list. As with a book, take notes. Go back over those notes at times. Do this daily. Items which are confusing, but a core component of what you do every day may need its own dedicated block. For example in addition to dedicating time to X confusing thing, you could learn one VIM command or trick every day and then have a list of items to practice.

It's part of our ongoing education.

I think you certainly hit the nail on the head as people seem afraid to ask about 'such simple things'. I think people want to be part of the 'in' and not feel like an outsider. It's a shame, it's much like the cliques of high school all over again. You just gotta act cool and not ask.

There's a lot of this around in the web industry at the moment, but there is no magic, just lots and lots of hype being shouted from lots and lots of bandwagons (and very rarely, some genuinely good work trying not to get lost in the noise).

A year or two ago, we were watching conference speakers and bloggers and authors and consultants sing the praises of AngularJS. It was surely the One True Framework, and if you didn't know it you were no-one. Don't tell that to anyone who's a fan of React today, though.

A year or two ago, Grunt was the shiny new tool for automating everything. Today, it's old hat, and apparently we're all supposed to be using Gulp instead.

A year or two ago, the previous Javascript module patterns and optimisers had become a plague on all our houses and we were implored to use AMD and RequireJS instead. Today, Browserify lets you use a module system bolted on to a server-side version of a language that only survived because it was the only client-side game in town on the client-side as well, and that constitutes progress.

And yet, for probably at least a decade, I haven't worked on a single commercial web development project that lasted less time than every much-hyped web technology's reign at the top. These fads literally come and go faster than any long-lived real project that might use them. They are good for demos, column inches, conference talks, and disposable MVPs that don't need to worry about irrelevant details like maintainability and still working next year.

So don't worry, Frank. Those kids you mentioned in your second sentence don't appreciate this, because they're kids and they want to play with their toys. When they grow up, they'll understand. :-)

If you can get what you need to done who cares? You can't learn everything.

I don't know Ruby. I don't know Node. I probably never will and I don't care. Because I can do the same type of things with Python and JS. Time is limited and I don't have it for learning redundant ways of doing the same thing (unless someone is paying me... that's different).

You should learn Git though. That's important.

I have coworkers who did little hacky stuff on the Web 10-15 years ago and think their knowledge is still relevant, so I respect Frank's honesty in admitting the web dev world has passed him by, or vice versa if you like. I use all the stuff he's talking about, though I believe I am slightly older than he is, so, not a kid.