As a developer, we all see new tech comes out every day, weather it’s a new way to manage your servers, or a new programming language, or a new framework claims can improve the quality of your project by a huge leap. By the nature of developers, we are excited, but also skeptical, some of us will give it a try, some will simply keep an eye on it, forget it’s existence after a month. Majority won’t even give it a try.

I know what you’re afraid of. We’re all busy, we don’t want to waste time on some mumbo jumbo. And some new thing will never take off. Hello, Dlang users, how’re you feeling today? Good? How about your, UWP developers? Oh, btw, how’s your Silverlight project going? Switched to Flash at the end? Good for you and welcome to mobile! You choose to write Xamarin projects for all mobile platforms? It’s good you didn’t choose PhoneGap.

The tech world is always moving forward, and there’s a reason for that, ancient tech is a liability, expensive liability. Software is never a done deal, requires constant maintenance, when IBM has to fix a bug in S/360, or when Microsoft has to issue a security path for XP, you can see tears in their team member’s face, and it’s not because of joy.

With processor becoming more powerful everyday, and with more knowledge flowing the internet, we constantly make new tech which will liberate us from tedious works. We often take thing for granted, but consider all the beautiful animations in your pocket computer, aka, phone, it’s built on layers of abstractions of layers of abstractions, we only need to write application to describe what size of a view we need, which color it should be, it translate to another layer, then another layer, at the end, carefully calculated pixel lights up or dims down. Without abstractions, a simple task, like draw a view, will take months. And these layers got build by constantly moving forward.

Software world is such an amazing world, you can easily find everything you need, to create something entirely new, that’s why we see new things coming out everyday, it might be created by a million dollar company, or one person in a corner of the world.

Remember, the core of your capacity is to fix a problem, build things, not the syntax of a language, or a method name in a framework.

Yes, the new tech you’re trying might fail someday, but you learned new ‘tricks’ along the way. Your Haskell skill didn’t help you to find a new job, so what, you learned how to do functional programming, you can use it in so many fields. Your preferred packaging management tool lost battle with big names, but by comparing them, you know the pros and cons of each of them, when cons of that big name finally come to hunt you, you know how to pivot. Microsoft is killing Silverlight, so what, with all the things you learned about browsers, devices, graphics, every team will be glad to have you on board. You’re familiar with Docker Swarm, but now you have to move to Kubernets, guess what, the concepts are similar, you can acquire new skills within a day or two. You’re a Swift earlier adopter, and now you need to do server side application develop, you’ll find Rust/Kotlin/Scala/Java somehow familiar.

The world is moving forward, learning new things is a requirement, being a qualified developer means being a life long learner. It’s hard for some people, but if you’re an earlier adopter of new tech, or someone who’s willing to try new things, you’ll find your job becomes easier everyday, not the other way around.