"Between a rock and a hard place". We have all (probably) come across this phrase, or even worse, experienced it, lived through it.
When you hear this, what goes on in your mind? What sparks?
In such a situation, you are always faced with two difficult options to choose one. Neither is pleasant, but you have to choose the scorpion or the snake, the pan or the fire.
I hope life has been fair to you!!
How does this relate to programming you ask?
Let's kick it up a notch.
Code... Rocks... Hard Places
Updates are a crucial part of software, from your OS to you apps, to even your wardrobe!!
We know the craze that comes with new releases of devices and whatnots.
iPhone 17 pre-order demand is significantly higher than the iPhone 16, with analysts reporting a 5-10% increase in early sales. The Pro Max model leads demand, with 60% higher production to meet demand, while the new "iPhone Air" model has seen a strong, high-demand release. China is seeing record-breaking demand
There are 2 categories of people. Those who will update to the latest versions of...anything, versus the ones who stick to the old. No harm in either, no judgement whatsoever.
In the context of updates, Kenya's giant telco, Safaricom, released a major update to their unified MyOneApp received a lot of backlash about it, but that had a different tune to our current song, so we wont get into it.
My big question to you is, why would you update (or apt upgrade ;)) to a newer version? Let me hear your thoughts.
Story time ...
I have been used to the normal way of doing things:
npm create vite@latest
npm i tailwindcss @tailwindcss/vite
Things always worked seamlessly, I was always a happy man. My last status check said that i was on Vite 7 and tailwind 4.
I ran my project well without fusses.
Then came this one day, I need to whip something up, so I do the usual, and suddenly I was running into errors. When your terminal goes blood red, you know someone(I mean something) is dead!!
Now I was panicking and not knowing what to do, because I needed to ship something.
The new vite was looking awesome and flashy, shifting to a more 'purple-y' theme. Our traditional yellow-orange shazam-like logo and what we were used to has now gotten a facelift(depending on how you choose to see it).
On an abnormal level, my OCD😉 doesn't allow me to be out-of date. I'm talking about going to the app store and just hitting update because I can and because that notification has some alert badge/pill on it.
I'm talking about some sudo apt update and 'sudo apt upgrade' just because it said 17 packages can be upgraded to latest version
Sometimes it works, and sometimes it just turns around and bites you where you can't see.
After so many keystrokes and keyboard wars, I (my OCD) was faced with the brutal... Keep vite 8 and forget about Tailwind(probably it still could work with postcss and autoprefixer, but meh!!), or go down a rung, back to vite 7.
Because I was in need, I took a glass of water and swallowed my pride😂.
Of course after a few unanswered DM's and tags to Tailwindcss and Vite, few weeks later, Tailwindcss 4.2.2 came out and my happiness was restored... Of course I hit the npm i vite@latest as soon as I could, bumped up tailwind as well, fought with package-lock.json and node_modules for a while, and I won (of course the system won).
I dont refute that updates are essential, especially on the security side of things(and with how fast react changes), there is another OCD side of found [X] vulnerabilities ([Y] low, [Z] moderate, [A] high, [B] critical). That thing scaaaarreesss me!! It always sends me scrambling to npm audit fix, and it's not like I'm making a fintech app...Its just a ToDo list!
So, would you always need to update? Do you read the changelogs and the effects it would have, or you just FAFO and taste it like I did?
Let me know your crazy experiences on Latest(rock) and Stable(hard place) side of versions.
Lets keep Reacting!
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