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Craig Nicol (he/him)
Craig Nicol (he/him)

Posted on • Originally published at craignicol.wordpress.com on

If you’re not living on the edge, you take up too much room

.net is a battleship, and it’s taken a long time to change everything to core, and figure out what the Framework/Core future is. In the meantime, you may have found your project crushed in the path as new APIs change or old technology gets deprecated.

Ask Java developers about where Oracle is taking their language and you’ll hear a similar story. The future is different. Maybe better, but in some places definitely worse.

Change is inevitable. That’s why our industry has embraced agile, so we’re ready to change on weekly or monthly cycles, not yearly ones. The longer it takes to make the decision to change, the more baggage you have, and the harder that change will be. That’s why Jez Humble recommends “if it hurts, do it more often”. That change may come from the business, from the competition, from the platform, or from the environment. How did you deal with Heartbleed, or Spectre? How many of your customers are still vulnerable, and are reducing herd immunity for the rest? Are other companies carrying your baggage without knowing it? Are you the reason that IE6 VMs are still a thing?

The bleeding edge is painful. .net Core broke things, Angular 2 broke things, Python 3 broke things, Edge broke things. But not keeping up breaks more.

How do you keep your tech contemporary?

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