The story began like this.
A buddy of mine works in operations at a well-known big company, and he has a programmer boyfriend. Lately, he's been complaining about his boyfriend's lack of ambition, expressing disdain.
So, I asked how he could tell his boyfriend lacked ambition, and my buddy said, "He uses PHP."
Now, I somewhat regret my response at the time: "PHP is indeed a bit... well..." I was wrong! I hope they didn't break up over this!
But then, what's wrong with not pursuing advancement in technology in a relationship?!
Who is the object of usage?
The point is, what's wrong with PHP? PHP even released version 8.3.0 RC 6 on November 9, 2023...
We live in an era of information explosion. Unless I'm actively searching for something, I have a habit of not chasing after trending topics.
I believe in a phenomenon I call "information ripple echo."
Imagine the public discourse as a pool, where information spreads like ripples in the water. When it reaches the edges of the pool or bubbles up through influencers within it, echoes are created.
When a particularly strong ripple occurs, it can reverberate across the pool multiple times.
Like this:
So, if a piece of information is strong enough (important enough), it will eventually find its way to me.
Therefore, I've always felt that if something is important, it will come to me, not the other way around.
The same goes for new technologies.
For instance, I've never gotten around to learning k8s, nor have I actively used Docker. Since it hasn't come to me, it must mean I don't really need it.
Speaking of which, my bad impression of k8s comes from an incident:
My buddy was working with a small team at the time. One day, the company's website went down. My buddy was baffled because the website was a simple Tailwind static page, and he couldn't understand why it was showing a 504 timeout.
So, he asked the colleague responsible for operations in Teams.
The answer left my buddy in despair. It turned out all the front-end sites, SPAs included, were packaged into Nginx images and managed through a cluster's ingress.
This wave of DevOps was well-promoted, please don't promote it next time.
Another absurdity lately was Next.js 14.
Although I've always mixed Vue with vanilla JavaScript, I also keep an eye on the development on the React side. The maneuvers with Next 14 truly startled me.
As someone who has dug holes with various languages for a long time, I deeply understand the core problems front-end engineers aim to solve. However, as a business operator, I'm also very aware of how much more comfortable it is for me to forsake these seemingly fancy things—I choose to give them up.
Yet, thinking about how they can still make money from such reckless tinkering makes me envious.
Perhaps,
This
Is
The new era's
Class of artists?
After all, in ancient times, only the elite could afford to study art and religion.
It feels good to have opened up.
I just want to stand with the people
Looking back, as I grow older and have less time, I find myself less and less inclined to be aggressively progressive in technology. Of course, this doesn't mean I've given up. I'm still learning; lifelong learning is my creed.
I just no longer deliberately pursue new technological trends—or to be more confident, remove 'technological.'
I believe this is highly correlated with the accumulation of experience (aka getting older). The more experience one has, the more one tends to summarize a "unified" framework to describe new things. This tendency has its good and bad sides.
On the good side, of course, is abstraction. Abstraction is powerful.
On the bad side, we usually describe this situation as experience becoming the shackles of thought.
Or, you could say, our hands have slowed down.
People often use "washed up" to describe individuals or things: once powerful, but now a shadow of their former selves.
In Cleveland, Ohio, USA, there's the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It specifically records historically famous and influential rock musicians, producers, engineers, and anyone who has contributed to rock music.
By today's standards, they would all be considered "washed up" musicians, expected to be living in poverty, appearing on
shows designed to exploit "washed up" artists.
This show would have to, should, must bring out Chuck Berry's AI avatar for a performance, and then have GAI as a judge to make some comments.
Is there a possibility,
I'm just saying a possibility,
That you haven't washed up,
But rather
Your audience just arrived too late.
Thank you (with respect)
