One of the eternal delights of being a “full stack” developer is that you get swapped between the data, front end, and back end teams with the vigor of a pair of squirrels playing badminton under the steady eyes of a horned owl who has promised mercy for the victor.
I’ve been reassigned. The past year and a half was spent leveraging an Angular based Single Page Application into an aging .NET Web Forms and MVC application. This is very much like trying to get a pair of Bluetooth headphones to connect to a 1904 Victrola. Now I am to address the deficiencies of the .NET application in all of its mutant glory.
The nice thing about .NET is that adults are in charge. Updates happen in a progressive fashion. You can ignore the first three years of .NET CORE and a few hours with a tutorial can bring you up to speed. Older features, even really awful ones, are generally supported… but any references to them are exiled into the howling wastes of the microsoft documentation archives.
The problem is shifting back.
Javascript based platforms are run by toddlers who have been given access to Monster energy drinks. If you spend more than a week away from things, its Planet of the Apes time when you return from orbit. Spend another week away and you’ll be sharing puzzled glances with Dr. Zira when a three foot chinchilla welcomes you to Margaritaville. Do you have a reservation?
I expect the next year to look like this.
Month 3: We’re no longer using smegCannon for loading dependencies, the community has moved onto BitNostril. Anyone who hasn’t even bothered to jettison last year’s KnockerLocker is beneath our collective contempt and will not be provided with migration scripts. Please try to keep up.
Month 6: We realize that we’ve put out two new full versions of Angular in the past year but Bobby had an epiphany. Or a brain aneurysm, we’re waiting on the MRI results to figure out which. We need to release a new version which completely and abruptly changes how we handle routing.
Backwards compatible? Bitch, please. Just because you invested 3500 developer hours building an application on the previous system is no excuse to not to refactor. Talk to your project manager.
Month 9: A Cartesian monk who had blinded themselves in a religious frenzy showed up at our conference in SF and convinced us that the outcome of their intense meditations in the chill darkness of the Yahoo server room is just the thing we need. Typescript is now base 13. You’ll have to get a new keyboard to handle the extra characters.
Month 12: DUDES! Bobby (who as it turned out had an aneurysm after all) just spent the last three weeks in the hospital being treated for complications from scurvy after consuming nothing but bulletproof coffee and oat cakes for the past year and had a lot of time to think. Javascript is for losers. Typescript is for losers too. Have you ever heard of Fortran?