A few weeks ago I came by a couple of articles my Marco Arment that share the theme of the current status of accelerated change within the development community as a way of stressing up, and being difficult to be up to date. After all, one gets tired of learning a new framework or language every size months. It gets to a point where is not funny or interesting anymore.

It seems like two different options are presented, that are available for developers after some time:

• Keep up, meaning that you adopt rapidly each new technology
• Move to other areas, typically management

Both are totally valid options, as I already said in this blog that I don’t like when good developers move to different areas (to me it’s sort of a surgeon deciding she had enough after a few years and move to manage the hospital). Though, obviously each person has absolutely every right to choose their career path.

But I think that it’s all mostly based in an biased and incorrect view of the field of technology and the real pace of changes.

In the last years, there has been an explosion of technologies, in particular for web. Ruby on Rails almost feels introduced at the same time as COBOL. NodeJS seemed to be in fashion for a while. The same with MongoDB or jQuery.

We all know that being stressed is not a great way of learn

In the last 6 or 7 years there has been an incredible explosion in terms of open source fragmentation. Probably because GitHub (and other online repos) and the increase in communication through the Internet, the bar to create a web framework and offer it to the world has been lowered so much, that a lot of projects that would’ve been not exposed previously, has gotten more exposure. As a general effect, is positive, but it came with the negative effect that every year there is a revolution in terms of technologies, which forces everyone to catch up and learn the brand new tool that is the best for the current development, increasing the churning of buzz words.

But all this is nothing but an illusion. We developers tend to laugh at the common “minimum 3+ years of experience in Swift”, but we still get the notion that we should be experts in a particular language, DB or framework since day one. Of course, of the one on demand today, or we are just outdated, dinosaurs that should retire.

Software development is a young field, full of young people. That’s great in a lot of aspects, but we need to appreciate experience, even if it comes from using a different technology. It doesn’t look like it, but there’s still a lot of projects done in “not-so-fancy” technologies. That includes really old stuff like Fortran or COBOL, but also C++, Java, Perl, PHP or Ruby.

Technologies gets established by a combination of features, maturity, community and a little luck.  But once they are established, they’re quite resilient and don’t go away easily.  They are useful for quite a long time. Right now it’s not that difficult to pick a tool that is almost guaranteed to be around in the next 10-15 years. Also, most of the real important stuff is totally technology agnostic, things like write clean code, structure, debug ability, communication, team work, transform abstract ideas into concrete implementations, etc… That simply does not go away.

Think about this. iOS development started in 2008. Smartphones are radically different beasts than the ones available 6 years ago, probably the environment that has changed more. The basics are the same, though. And even if Swift has been introduced this year, it’s based in the same principles. Every year there has been tweaks, changing APIs, new functionalities. But the basic ideas are still the same. Today a new web development using LAMP is totally viable. Video games still relay on C++ and OpenGL. Java is still heavily used. I use all the time ideas mainly developed in the 70s like UNIX command line or Vim.

Just because every day we get tons of news about new startups setting up applications on new paradigms, that doesn’t mean that they don’t coexist with “older” technologies.

Of course, there are new tricks to learn, but it’s a day by day additive effort. Real revolution and change of paradigm is rare, and normally not a good sign. Changing from MySQL to PostgreSQL shouldn’t be considered a major change in career. Searching certain stability in the tools you use should be seen as good move.

We developers love to stress the part of learning everyday something new and constantly challenge ourselves, but that should be taken also in perspective with allowing time to breathe. We’ve created a lot of pressure on ourselves in terms of having to be constantly pushing with new ideas, investigating in side projects and devoting ourselves 100% of the time to software. That’s not only not realistic. It’s not good.

You only have to breathe.  And just worry on doing a good work and enjoy learning.