I don't normally venture into the world of programming on this blog, but what the hell.

These are interesting times. There's no shortage of things to geek out over: virtual reality (even if it's been hyped since the 90s), robotics, AI, big data, 101 dalmatians (I mean JavaScript frameworks), Microsoft purposefully embracing open source and linux, and of course the fact that your average person walking down the street has the equivalent of a super computer burning a hole in their pocket (in some cases literally; read reviews before buying a new phone, folks).

The irony is that it's easy to fall prey to information overload and simply have too many options to choose from. And even choosing a single technology to focus on, odds are there are conflicting tools, frameworks, and general philosophies that can be mind melting. And not in a good way.

I suppose one way to approach it is akin to politics. If someone is nonstop positive and refuses to say anything negative, they're probably not worth talking to unless you're just looking for marketing speak. If all they do is harp on the negative aspects, well, same but mainly because no one likes talking with an asshole all day.

The fun part is that the things you fall into are often really just coincidental. The tooling and specs just happened to be stable when you started to use it. The documentation was fleshed out and tutorials were posted by some popular tech god. You actually seemed to be able to solve problems.

Sadly, that's usually not the case in my experience. Most help documentation is woefully inadequate and either targets a really old version, or a new version that hasn't even been released yet. Tooling breaks. Incessantly. And error messages don't really help, except point you to a closed issue on StackOverflow that doesn't actually resolve the issue.

I like to keep things simple. I don't want to have to give a seminar for three weeks in order for someone new to get up to speed on a project. A lot of the tooling, frameworks, etc. are simple… if you're already fluent with them and use the environment they assume. So I find myself dropping down away from newer techs (and especially away from further abstraction layers; heavy weight ORMs are more likely to get in my way than not).

Anyway, I apologize for the geek talk. It's probably not what you were expecting or desired. And I didn't even really go into (excruciating) detail. That's the scary part :)