You may have heard of Marie Kondo, a Japanese Organization Consultant, she wrote a book called The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. In the book she discusses her method of organising, which is known as the KonMari method, it consists of gathering together all of one's belongings, one category at a time, and then keeping only those things that "spark joy", and choosing a place for everything from then on.
I think it could be a cathartic process for your digital life also, what if you gathered all of your digital "things" together, all of the languages, frameworks, libraries, and tools that you use, and decide what to keep from each category. What would you choose?
I think it's more important now than ever to review your "toolset" with this in mind. For your own well-being, you should remove things, keep the "joyful", and slowly add more. There is such a proliferation of new tech, this is a decision you need to take again and again, so it is important to have a good ethos for your personal life and career.
Oldest comments (44)
Try Elixir and Phoenix :)
observablehq.com and quokkajs.com
I wish regular development could have that kind of feedback loop
Some of the observable journals are beautiful, I have not used it, but would like to pick it up some time :-)
Sounds like you wish for a Lisp
Before answering that question, I'd go back to the roots of the KonMari method. "Sparking joy" is an imperfect translastion from Japanese, says redditor:
Looking forward is crucial in technology. Tools and frameworks are constantly evolving. Sometimes, this happens too fast, with people focusing too much on trends and buzzwords.
"Joy" is not the term I'd use for my experience with npm - quite often, it's exactly the opposite, I'm feeling very frustrated. But in going forward with my current project, npm is the tool that will let me reach my goals.
Yep, I agree that you have to look forward in tech, and evolve, but I think it's important to be rooted in the present and not to be swayed too much, or too far from the core of what you enjoy. Of course, sometimes you have to use a tool because of a work environment, or the high adoption rate in the industry. So, if you can choose, choose a work environment that uses your "happy" stack!
I have not had to use npm extensively, so I cant share your pain! The trend that some people hope for is to use native imports more in the future and reduce the reliance on npm, I believe that's the ecosystem Deno is going for
I noticed a lot of people speaking fondly about TailwindCSS. It's on my radar :-)
Personally, I don't really see the benefit of TailwindCSS, or I haven't use it much.
Yes, please Change my mind.
You know, programming in React is sparking joy for me. I like how easy it is to create components and refactor them into smaller pieces. It's 6 years old an still going strong, evolving and getting better while not leaving old code behind.
VSCode and Prettier together work so well :) And TypeScript as always makes me happy to work with as it provides such a great Development Experience. I really cannot begin to start a new project without TS anymore :)
I started using Prettier recently and it makes life easier. I appreciate tools with good defaults and that just work!
Yes, I can imagine, you need to learn and buy into the mindset, and then it becomes easy 😏
I was a Ruby/Rails stan for a long long time. Did modern javascript for a couple years, going through all of the relationship phases there. Then I got a job doing C#/dotnet, all the type safety and building before seeing any change was annoying at first. But then it started clicking. I've grown very skilled at learning to like whatever platform I'm working in. But, C# is the first language that I'd genuinely be happy coding in for the foreseeable future.
I've had similar experiences going from language to language. If you go from statically typed to dynamically typed, it can feel wild west in the beginning, but once you recognise the types of things you need to be concerned with, and what you can ignore, the paranoia dissipates. For me, JS still feels a bit wild west. I prefer languages with more substantial built-in libraries. Over time, with familiarity, you can grow to like a language, but I think depending on your background and personality, you can be drawn to particular languages more.
For me it's my favorite side project which is a to do/ time tracking app that I use every day. Often times when working for clients I am completely detached from the end result. I will never use it myself. Using my app is the opposite of that and it gives me so much joy to have build something which is very useful to me and it makes me even more proud if it is useful to others as well..
The other side of writing code is liking what you're building! If you build own tools, I think it will give you more joy by default, especially since it matches your mental model for doing something.
Kotlin and Coroutines