How to stay relevant as a developer when everything keeps changing around you

Photo credit: Parker Byrd.

Technology is evolving rapidly. While this is exciting, it can be exhausting to try to stay relevant as a developer.

It’s hard to keep up with so many changes. This is especially the case with Javascript becoming more prevalent. There are newer technologies coming out all the time that are all competing against each other.

Should you learn Angular 1? Did you know Angular 2 is out? They actually released Angular 4 too. What about Ember? They had a big rewrite. And Ember 2? Isn’t that better than ever? What about React? What should you learn? How do you stay up to date? And what about WebPack?

Everything in the programming ecosystem is changing so fast. Even senior developers experience something called Javascript fatigue. And if senior developers face it, how can someone looking to break into the industry ever imagine to stay up to speed?

Take a deep breath

You’ve got this.

In 1975, Frederick Brooks wrote a book called The Mythical Man Month. In the book, Brooks discusses situations where programmers work together. Believe it or not, pretty much everything he talked about still rings true today.

This is despite the fact that Brooks was working on the ALGOL programming language and OS/360—two distant relics of programming—while writing it.

The good news is some stuff simply don’t change that much in programming.

Most new programming languages and frameworks adopt core programming ideas and use them in different ways.

To put it another way, a lot of programming ideas are like episodes of the hit 1980s show The A-Team. In my opinion, this is arguably one of the best shows ever created.

If you’re tuning into a new episode, you can be pretty sure that a few things are going to happen:

• Mr. T is going to refuse to go on a plane.
• A member of the crew will give him some milk, which has sedatives, that will cause Mr. T to pass out.
• HM Murdock will fly the crew out.
• The bad guys will get what’s coming to them.

The specific details of each episode might change a little bit, but you really only need to watch one or two to get a feel for what to expect.

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