Published: Fri 30 December 2022

By ali In Meta.

After almost 7 years of no posts I decided to give this blog an update. In the meantime I've changed jobs a couple of times (which deserves its own rant on the alleged "skilled worker shortage"), and switched back and forth between tech stacks and business domains. It's really incredible how much has changed technology-wise in the relatively short period beteween 2016 and 2023, and that's not the only thing that came to my mind by looking at my old blog posts. Some of them are over 12 years old now, and some content seems really outdated, e.g. me mentioning Windows 7 or 32/64bit versions of operating systems. This also turned into a sort of more 'professional' blog, so I removed some posts that were more on the "super informal" side of things. What's even more stunning to me that my last blog post from 2016 mentions Vagrant which nowadays sounds hilariously outdated to me, or that all other posts barely mentioned JavaScript.
Long story short: I also was dragged in to the 'JavaScript everywhere' revolution, and went from "just a little jQuery here and there" to "100% NodeJS" just within 3-4 years. I went from CoffeeScript/AngularJS 1.x to Angular2+/MeteorJS/React and finally GraphQL and server-side TypeScript, interrupted by short involvements with Java. I really like where Java and its technologies are going, but my blog posts regarding Java dindn't age that well either. Coming from Ruby/Rails the transition to NodeJS felt natural to me, and the opportunities that contained working with NodeJS felt right and came at the right time. Fast forward, I'm already working with NodeJS for 5 years in a row, that's almost half of NodeJS's total lifespan. I never saw that coming, if you asked me in 2011 if I would ever work professionally with just JavaScript, my answer would be "no way"! 🤣
Another thing I didn't see coming was the rise of Python. My blog post from 2010 where I can't decide wheter Python or Ruby are worth learning now almost seems comical. After being a Ruby/Rails developer was my first real job as a software engineer I totally didn't take into account whether that was a sustainable career path, especially in Germany. While Ruby was (and up to a certain degree stays) my most loved programming language, for me it became not sustainable to just stay with Ruby, and I'm afraid Ruby will never have a comeback to the popularity it had from 2009 to 2015. Another testament to this is that I could not keep this blog updated, it was always based on Jekyll which I could not get to work anymore on recent Ruby versions, so I completely transitioned to Pelican which was a more than pleasant experience.
I also noticed that I became somewhat lazy in a sense that I don't want to fiddle around with stuff endlessly anymore. Sure, total control over your blogging framework is nice and all, but in the meantime I'm preferring stuff that "just works". Maybe Ruby/Rails really spoiled me too much, and now the Ruby ecosystem can't keep up with its own claims?
Anyhow, I'm really excited about the stuff I'm going to write about and if it will age that horribly like the rest. To the next 7 years!