Osmose

I make websites and chiptunes!

  • he/him

AKAs:
Lapsed Neurotypical
JavaScript's Strongest Warrior
Fake Podcast Host
Thotleader
Vertically Integrated Boyfriend
Your Fave's Mutual
Certified 5x Severals by the RIAA
Inconsistently Medicated
The Source That Views Back
Carnally Known
The Alternative


Homepage
osmose.ceo/

Like, first off, you're not really expected to keep up with every new development—I still haven't built a site with GraphQL even though it's past it's peak ubiquity. You just need to not be afraid of the possibility of learning something new.

I looked up GraphQL once for like 5 mins years ago to see what shape of thing it was, and now if I'm ever on a project that seems like it might benefit from it, that's when I do a 30 min look into what it actually provides and why I might use it, and most of that is just searching for those questions and seeing what other people have said.

Having said that, I've also still "kept up" with the latest in JS through two pretty low-effort habits:

  • I read the headlines and articles on Hacker News while using uBlock Origin and the filter news.ycombinator.com##.subtext to hide the comments and upvotes. This is hardly comprehensive and doesn't constitute a "healthy" view of silicon valley tech but it's broader than just JS and at least lets me know the major things tech bros care about. Again, I cannot emphasize how important it is to ignore the comments as they provide much more harm than benefit, and the site is considered a cesspool for a reason.
  • Newsletters! The real trick is that people are already doing the work for you and summarize stuff. My current newsletter for JS is https://bytes.dev/ which can be a bit blindly positive about new tech but hasn't, like, pivoted to being about LLMs or any shit like that.

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in reply to @Osmose's post:

also like, if you want to learn the Dominant Framework rn that's React, and the last truly major change to React was hooks which is like 5-6 years old. There's all sorts of fads you can chase year-to-year but you don't need to know about them unless someone with money is asking you to, imo

the main place of pain and suffering is in the dev tooling around webpack, which

i'm just going to throw this out there, coming from a very stick in the mud java developer

i understand why people want code to be able to exist in a build process instead of encapsulated into plugins

this is also the source of pain and suffering. the real fruit of knowledge inside of pandora's box. it is a mistake and you Will regret it.

i understand why people want code to be able to exist in a build process instead of encapsulated into plugins

What's the difference here? I barely ever used Maven or other Java build systems besides running ones other people maintained and I don't quite get what you mean.