Surviving the Framework Hype Cycle

MountainWest RubyConf 2016

Brandon Hays

#developer-experience

Surviving the Framework Hype Cycle

by Brandon Hays

In the talk "Surviving the Framework Hype Cycle" given by Brandon Hays at the MountainWest RubyConf 2016, the speaker addresses the rapid pace of change in web development and the challenges developers face keeping up with new frameworks and technologies. Hays utilizes the 'hype cycle' concept, originally proposed by Gartner, to illustrate the life cycle of technologies from their inception through periods of inflated expectations, disillusionment, and ultimately to productivity.

Key Points Discussed:

Framework Overload: Developers are overwhelmed by the number of frameworks and tools available, likening the situation to an abundance of choices that can lead to decision paralysis.
Midlife Crises Analogy: Hays uses the metaphor of a midlife crisis to describe how developers may rush to adopt new technologies out of fear of becoming obsolete.
Pain Points: He outlines three main pain points:
- The overwhelming array of options makes it difficult to evaluate technologies.
- New tools often fail to meet initial expectations, leading to disappointment.
- The fast-paced evolution of tech tools creates an environment where developers feel insecure and hesitant to commit to any particular technology.
The Hype Cycle: Hays explains the stages of the hype cycle: Technology Trigger, Peak of Inflated Expectations, Trough of Disillusionment, Slope of Enlightenment, and Plateau of Productivity. He emphasizes that many technologies do not actually die but rather evolve over time.
Historical Context: He talks about the history of Ruby on Rails and its growth and challenges within this framework cycle. He highlights how despite many of its perceived failures, Rails remains a productive technology today.
Types of Technologists: Hays categorizes developers into three types: Pioneers (who explore and adopt new tech), Settlers (who refine and apply it), and Town Planners (who implement stable solutions).
Comfort and Caution: He reassures developers not to feel ashamed for continuing to use familiar technologies that allow them to be productive while also encouraging vigilance against becoming irrelevant or overly attached to outdated tools.

In conclusion, Hays encourages developers to embrace a methodical approach to adopting new technologies, suggesting they reflect on their preferences and the current stage of the tech to navigate their careers effectively. Instead of succumbing to the hype, developers should focus on functionalities that align with their projects and understanding the context in which they operate.

00:00:23.160 Next up is Brandon Hays. Brandon is a dear friend of mine and... oh man, I had the perfect joke, and I just blanked on what it was. I was going to embarrass you so bad, and I completely forgot what it was.

00:00:35.960 The one thing I'll say about Brandon is that I think about him every single day because my wallet got stolen the other day, and my current wallet is the My Little Pony wallet that he gave me. I pull that out everywhere, and people give me that look. But Brandon's fantastic, and we're so happy to have him back.

00:00:50.079 He spoke at Mountain West JavaScript but never at Mountain West Ruby. He's now in Austin running his own consultancy. He's a big monkey mck, but welcome back to Utah and welcome to Mountain West.

00:01:15.759 Mike, good afternoon. I have changed cities and programming communities in the last few years here and there, but Ruby is in my blood. I'll talk a little bit about that, maybe later if we have time; otherwise, forget it. Who cares?

00:01:22.040 After four years of getting on the freeway to drive to work, the drive here this morning was really unsettling. It was genuinely upsetting to me. Like, where is the bumper-to-bumper traffic? Why do you have public transit? What is this place? I don't recognize Utah.

00:01:36.399 I guess I have acclimated to how horrible things are in some ways. Every person from Austin will talk about the traffic to keep you from moving there. So this is the title of the talk: "We're here to learn how to dockerize your React container".

00:02:00.640 Everybody forget everything you know currently about web development and just strap in. Hang on! I'm being alerted, my Tech Death Watch app just informed me that Docker and React are over. So forget anything you may have learned already. We are now going to learn how to webpack your Elm Kubernetes.

00:02:19.760 According to Hacker News, the first thing you need to do to get to hello world with webpacking Elm Kubernetes is I don't know what those things are. They are words I assume that are made up by people who hate us. Thought leaders in tech have taught me to use your insecurities to sell something to you, so that's exactly what I'm here to do today.

00:02:40.200 First, let's talk about midlife crises. A midlife crisis is complicated, but basically, it's when you start to face your mortality, and you start making some rash decisions. This is my dad when he was just a shade younger than I am now, and he shares my enthusiasm for fanny packs. This is his little brother. My dad went full-blown midlife crisis and picked up the car, traveled the world, got remarried a couple of times, and moved his family across the country. This is his midlife crisis.

00:03:37.280 As web developers, our knowledge expires so fast that we start fixating on its mortality almost all the time, which leads us to making some rash decisions. So if you're new to Ruby or just really really love it, I bring you a word of comfort regarding your career. If you're lucky enough to feel comfortable with it, then I also bring you a word of caution.

00:04:06.640 Since the web seems to reinvent itself every 45 seconds, it's tough to think past the next framework we’re supposed to learn, or you'll become instantly and permanently unemployable. I'm Brandon; I help run the Frontside, and I think we're doing some pretty special stuff over there. We're working on a catchy slogan so people know who we are.

00:04:30.560 This is us a little over a year ago. We've always been a pretty tight-knit group of folks trying to help and teach each other. We've grown since then, but our mission is the same: we build great software and grow great software developers. We really like making adventurous and ambitious front-end apps. We like to use Ember for that, which is a JavaScript framework notable for being authored by an anthropomorphic hamster.

00:05:36.800 It was when I was first learning Ember that I started noticing a pattern that I want to share with you. So let's talk about the state of web development today and explore that a bit. But I'll let Clubber Lang make a prediction for you if you're trying to keep up with the pace of new tools, languages, and frameworks. My prediction is: it's pain.

00:06:37.200 Pain point number one: how are you supposed to keep up and stay on top of new tools, much less evaluate them? Ember is about four and a half years old, and other frameworks have come along since then—a significant number of them. So I want to know: in what universe are there 24 best JavaScript frameworks? Let's be honest about how many of those there really are.

00:08:10.800 You just sit and stare at all the choices like an open fridge with a bunch of mystery foods in there, and most of them you’re pretty sure are moldy. People talk about this like you're supposed to have evaluated all these, but you haven't heard of half of them. Maybe I'm too old. This starts feeling like a treadmill—a mean-spirited treadmill that's always set just a little bit faster than you can run. So who set up this ecosystem? Was this designed by these people to punish us?

00:09:07.440 The second pain point is that once you do actually decide on a stack, there's just no way it can live up to your expectations. It's like you're sitting there waiting for 20 years for a new Indiana Jones movie, and when it finally comes out, it’s about aliens whose treasure is knowledge—that's just not okay! This new tool is super amazing, but when it comes time to actually ship, what used to take minutes can now take days.

00:10:08.960 Documentation is scarce; you're diving into the source code to see whether it's a bug in the tool or your fault. You don't know who set that up; my guess is this kid's using it wrong. He didn't read the source. The third pain point is that it never feels safe to fall in love with your tools. My grandpa built houses with the same miter saw for 30 years, but your tools are obsolete in less than 30 months.

00:11:10.120 I checked Google Trends, and I’m afraid I have some bad news: Rails didn't make it. We did everything we could; we even tried giving it WebSocket support. I'm so sorry. The injuries it sustained from Node were just too great. Damn it, this was always the hardest part of the job. I'll see you at the crossroads, Rails.

00:12:36.120 MySQL died so long ago that I'm sure only a handful of people even remember what that was, back when we still used relational databases. You can ask your grandma about relational databases. Sometimes she'll explain it to you. That poor, poor MySQL dolphin. My favorite front-end framework got killed last year because a new library showed up. So what do I do now? Tomster, no! Please, you were so young.

00:13:38.480 I think everyone here will remember where they were when we heard that Ruby had died. It almost makes you feel bad for all the time we spent dancing on Java's grave. The thing is, this process you're starting to get a pattern here is totally predictable. So predictable in fact that there is a chart for it. There's a company called Gartner that gets paid a lot of money by a lot of companies to chart where tech trends fall along this cycle every year.

00:14:35.600 None of the things that we talked about earlier actually died, did they? It turns out once a technology gains popularity, it is harder to get rid of than Steven Seagal's 2. Okay, so we're just trying to get from a higher state of pain to a lower one. Then something comes along that addresses and in some cases creates the sense of dissatisfaction with our current tools.

00:15:28.840 What's amazing is how quickly this can happen. I was at MacWorld in 2007 when Steve Jobs got up and said, 'Hey, here's an iPhone.' I took my six-month-old Motorola Q out of my pocket, looked at it, and I was so mad that I literally wanted to hurl my existing phone at the screen for not being the phone I had just learned existed.

00:16:36.080 That doesn't seem rational, but it's how the brain works. So I want to look at this cycle from three angles: first in the abstract, then through the lens of the history of Ruby on Rails, and lastly how to apply this when you're confronted with new technology. Finally, I want to offer that bit of comfort and caution to people who feel uneasy watching the pace of change in technology.

00:17:30.560 Let's start with the concepts and walk through how this cycle works. Naturally, we'll use Medium ThinkPES, which is now the de facto way to mark the start of all these phases. The first is the technology trigger: there's this launch with a big promise, and the initial spark of interest hits a few early adopters. Hacker News gets all excited and starts voting it up, and the tech is off to the races.

00:19:09.800 Then we hit the peak of inflated expectations. Suddenly, it’s all anyone’s talking about—performance, security, new capabilities you never even dreamed of are all yours if you will just adopt this new tool. At some point, that rocket ride ends, and you find yourself in the trough of disillusionment. The tech doesn’t meet those outrageous expectations; it’s not a panacea.

00:20:08.960 You get people loudly quitting, wailing, and gnashing their teeth. If the tech survives, you reach this slope of enlightenment where you start seeing a light at the end of the tunnel. You hear things like 2.0 and 3.0, the tooling gets better, learning materials get better, and a community starts to form around it. Finally, we get to the plateau of productivity, where a bunch of people just become quietly productive.

00:21:23.440 They don't really see the need to talk about it too much. And here’s something I promise you will never see on Hacker News: 'Yeah, we've been quietly productive with Ember for about 18 months; it’s pretty nice.' Like, who cares? Go home. This doesn’t belong on Hacker News.

00:22:28.920 These are the peaks and valleys of successful technologies if they make it through that trough alive. So let’s look at this cycle through the lengthy lens of Rails history. How many people remember this? It just used Ruby everywhere. Look at all the things I'm not doing. That's how much work you have to do to get to hello world. That’s not a lot. Whoops, it worked.

00:23:31.440 I assume a lot of people, based on the amount of gray hair I've seen in this room today compared to my first Mountain West. I'm going to guess that a lot of people in here remember this. This was the technology trigger. How many people were totally blown away when you saw that for the first time? Okay, a fair number have decided to out themselves as extremely old.

00:24:36.240 I wasn't even a programmer yet at the time, but my friend showed me this, and it made me want to become one. So luckily for us, BuzzFeed was there to capture every step of Rails rise to power. I was so glad I was able to dig these out of the archives. From this point, the tech analysts and Hacker News crowd couldn't trip over themselves enough to fight over whether Rails was truly the chosen framework, the one that would make your wildest dreams come true.

00:25:50.799 Curate bids the height, builds until it becomes a little ludicrous. Then Wes hits its peak of inflated expectations. I wanted to Photoshop something amazing, but I couldn’t because this exists. Just ponder this a moment: migrate database, fix a leaky gutter, it’s all there. Ruby everywhere!

00:27:06.760 And who could forget Def Leppard's monster hit from that era? If only the community had someone wise enough to predict this around, I don't know, like RailsConf 2006? Except we did. His name was Why the Lucky Stiff, and I wish I could thank him for all he's done for me, including inspiring me that code could be art.

00:28:10.000 When I was struggling to learn how to program, he had an astoundingly pertinent warning for us ten years ago, and I encourage you to go back and watch his Rails talk. Right now, anything is possible with Ruby. First of all, it’s unstoppable. The hype machine is totally rolling down the street. People have been trying to hit the brakes. The brakes on the hype machine are all burned out, and they don't work anymore.

00:29:07.680 And so many great projects have used Ruby that it’s proof that you can do anything you desire. Any of your wildest dreams can come true. I used Ruby to lure Catherine Zeta-Jones into my unicorn petting zoo. You have a unicorn petting zoo made entirely of Ruby.

00:30:11.920 So, here at the froest peak, just mentioning the name of the technology in the title of your introductory conference talk means it’s going to be standing room only. You can Google for one of 100 Hello World tutorials and none of them actually help you understand the new technology, but they’re there.

00:31:20.080 Once you do figure it out, the promise of productivity means that you’re finally going to ship web apps ten times better. You’re going to be a ten-times developer, so when a recruiter asks if you’re a rockstar developer or a Jedi, you’ll be able to say, 'Yeah, both.' You’re going to wow your boss, and you’re going to buy the house, get the raise, and fulfill your wildest dreams.

00:32:32.040 Now, that’s not the actual promise, but it’s the one we buy into. And the hot air from all these inflated expectations starts to inflate our ego just a little bit, and you start thinking that maybe anybody who came before you was totally wrong, and you are totally right.

00:33:39.440 You get to get up on stage and tell the establishment exactly what you think of them, and what is more fun than that kind of rocket ride? Come on, the che... we’re taking this baby to the moon. Only one problem: like drinking expired soy sauce, the reality starts catching up with you. A technology inevitably slides into the trough of disillusionment.

00:34:39.440 Again, if only someone could have predicted this. Mr. Mski, obviously some people here don’t have your vast vision for Ruby, and I’m not sure even I understand the point of indulging these decadent wishes any further. You’re just setting this all up for a huge crash when things don’t pan out and the idealism fades.

00:35:56.320 The world moves on to the next language—something even more beautiful and expressive. I like to call this imaginary future language Absinth, a language smooth and creamy and scented with the purest of licorice. She’s lying! Absinth is the apocalypse. She’s got rabies! Keep the cure to ourselves, she’s going to steal our classes.

00:37:31.600 Really missed that guy. I always did wonder if Elixir was intended as an oblique reference to Absinth, but I don’t know. This phase is marked by prominent defectors, the thing that causes people to leave for greener pastures. Some people are getting this slide, causing them to leave for other greener pastures.

00:38:51.360 Go flip and figure. This is my favorite slide. I don’t know if people remember this, but there were some prominent defectors in this phase for Rails. But this one takes the cake for me, personally. I met this guy at a Mountain West conference when I was a pretty new developer, and he seemed fine.

00:39:54.080 But I mean, this dude literally offered to fight every developer, which seems, I don’t know, perhaps a little aggro considering we're talking about which interpreter we use to take in strings of characters we type into a computer. Like, hey, man, do you want to fight about it? Like, no, I was going to issue a pull request.

00:41:03.920 But that’s the amazing thing, right? Once the super early adopters declare the tool dead to them, it actually starts doing some real work. This is where you start seeing service-oriented architecture talks at conferences. You know people are putting technology to work when it has to speak XML across non-REST endpoints.

00:42:46.560 This is where those blog tutorials start turning into book deals, and a loose affiliation of enthusiasts starts turning into a real community. And all those enterprise dollars start buying race cars. You’re welcome. Finally, there’s a plateau where a bunch of people become quietly productive with the technology, and they don’t see the need to talk about it anymore.

00:43:58.640 There’s nothing exciting or cool about quiet productivity. You don’t get any more magazine covers. It’s been a decade since MySQL did anything anyone considered cool, but billions of dollars—with an 'S'—I think is pretty cool. Is Rails a good technology or a bad technology? Well, that’s irrelevant now, because it’s entrenched and productive technology.

00:45:54.640 Now, we'll have to take a little bit of a detour before we dive back into the history. At a RubyConf talk last year, I got into the concept that there are these three predominant types or sets of preferences in technologists: Pioneers, Settlers, and Town Planners.

00:47:32.960 We’ll run through a quick cliff notes version of that. Pioneers itch for the latest technology; they like forging the rivers of new things, contributing, and exploring new territory. It’s the thrill of discovery. Settlers try to create order from that chaos that the Pioneers discover; they build infrastructure and communities.

00:49:41.000 They connect that pioneering work with real business and user needs. Town Planners are just trying to get things done at a scale and performance that’s impossible with unproven technology. They’re trying to turn exciting tech boring, and they will always win.

00:51:16.640 So let's dive back into the history to see how this all fits together. My theory is that DHH is actually a Settler who was kind of pushed into pioneering a solution out of frustration. I doubt he’d disagree that many of his ideas came from Pioneers like Martin Fowler.

00:52:42.960 Now, outside of Utah, I have to explain this slide here. I can kind of infer some things that we have a whole day for Pioneers on July 24th. It’s bigger than July 4th! And they’re like, what? Tech loves its Pioneers too, and we throw our little parades for them.

00:53:59.200 When Rails fired that starting gun with the blog in 15 minutes, we threw a parade for DHH, and Rails at that time was actually really surprisingly similar in look and feel to the Rails that you’ll see today. But you die a death of a thousand cuts if you actually try to use it, much less deploy it.

00:55:26.960 If anybody remembers how that was done, I’m so, so sorry. I remember it like I remember a guy named Rusty from our early Rails shop. I was on the marketing team so I didn't know what was going on with this stuff. I just knew that our customers would call and yell at me when he would kick the billing server.

00:57:18.160 It would bill people ten or thirty times. So we had some deployment issues over there. These poor schmucks even bet their companies on this unproven new technology. I wonder what ever happened to those folks?

00:58:29.520 This is a fun bit of retconning. This didn’t used to be a demo store; it was Toby Luckey’s actual original business idea that Shopify was extracted from. I think he should have stuck with this one, but I could be wrong. Then the settlers started arriving. People need guides and books and supporting libraries—deploy tools and hosting services.

00:59:32.640 The settlers are all too happy to look at those as opportunities to help and build businesses. So you might at this time have had like nine gems or ten gems starting with Access, maybe more. Rails 2 introduced RESTful routing that basically turned it from an academic concept into the predominant architecture for web apps these days, which is kind of cool.

01:00:24.960 A huge part of settling an area is setting up the schools, and we owe a huge debt of gratitude for Ry to Ryan Bates for starting RailsCasts. I definitely had two or three tabs open to this at all times, and my boss thought I was a genius.

01:01:31.920 Some more no-name startups are dumping their futures into this black hole. There we go, more hipsters dumping their futures in the black hole. Right, get a grip, hipsters. GitHub got their start using Rails around this time. Now, you got to love a service that launches with the promise 'no longer a pain in the ass—hardcore forking action, never forget!'

01:02:46.960 Now, Rails was created to fight the architecture astronauts that had set up shop and fragmented Java culture, but as needs grew, more complex architectures adapted. The previously mign computer science folks took over much of the development of Rails; they brought modularity and relational algebra to Active Record.

01:03:57.840 The big money starts moving in, and the Rails tent has to get bigger, including code schools and enterprise needs. At this point, both your bank and the startup disrupting them are using Rails. So that’s how these three archetypes play out in a successful community.

01:05:16.240 Everyone has all these three sets of preferences and these personality types in this big soupy mess, but one is typically dominant. So I want to take a little quiz, which irritates you the most: being required to use outdated tooling or team members that try to rewrite your codebase in the latest hipster stack? They’re webpacking your Kubernetes!

01:06:48.720 Anything that gets in the way of shipping. What do you like the most: accepting a pull request for an open-source library, applying a technology in a way that makes a company money, or solving a tricky performance issue? What makes you feel most helpful: showing someone that there's a new and better way of doing things, improving somebody else's documentation, or automating a tedious deploy process?

01:08:02.640 Now this was the Cosmo quiz edition of this talk. Those things will generally kind of give you a sense of like, 'Oh, I have a certain set of preferences that lead me to the front edge of a technology' or 'I prefer stuff that's stable.' All of those roles are important. The Pioneers experiment, and they help define a sense of what the future could look like.

01:09:53.960 Settlers connect that with real problems and opportunities, and town planners help it scale to affect large numbers of people. Settlers and town planners may call Pioneers hipsters that are swept around by the latest fad technology.

01:11:07.000 Pioneers often get mad at settlers for using their innovations to gain notoriety or make money, and town planners get called out for lacking a sense of adventure, for being architecture astronauts when they’re just trying to make things stable, predictable, and scalable. As humans, we’re wired to be dismissive of those that don’t share our default outlook.

01:12:11.680 It’s funny: I think we take each one of these roles on at different points, but it's to our advantage to lean on the ones we're best at and strongest. For me, I perform best in the settler camp as a default because I enjoy connecting things to practical uses.

01:13:19.920 Okay, great, you know the hype cycle. You have an idea of your preferences. What now? Well, once you know this stuff, you can set yourself up for success and avoid being at the mercy of this cycle. There are also ways to lose: you can watch as your skills turn into commodities and become devalued, you can burn yourself out keeping up, or you can side with tech that doesn’t wind up making it, or you can opt out entirely and become a Fortran developer.

01:14:53.840 I think that pays actually pretty well. But you can hack the Tech treadmill like Zero Cool in Hackers. This may all seem like total information overload right now, but once you understand your preferences, you can focus your attention on where it’s most valuable.

01:16:57.680 So now, let's use this to map out the cycle for your personality type. You simply can't get wrapped up in every new tool that comes out. But when you do feel obligated to check something out, you just need to answer these two questions: What stage is it in, and should I concern myself? Pioneers are best served by grabbing interesting new tools and jumping right in as soon as they hear about them.

01:18:03.040 Settlers can just watch, and Planners can safely ignore it. At the peak, it's time for Pioneers to shine; Settlers can exercise skepticism, but they need to keep an open mind. Town Planners can safely ignore and keep shipping with what they know.

01:19:41.920 This phase is where everyone starts taking notice of a technology, but it rewards Pioneers the most. Pioneers can train, consult, write blog posts, contribute, and even become core team members. Once that cools off a little bit, though, the Pioneers can bail out if they want.

01:20:49.760 They can change roles and stick it out, but they have to acknowledge the fact that they're changing roles to become a settler. If it looks like the technology is going to make it through and be valuable, Town Planners can glance up if they want.

01:21:51.760 At the slip in enlightenment, the Pioneers are just done. The technology is climbing that slope because enterprising settlers are writing books, establishing consultancies, building products, and creating a support infrastructure.

01:23:25.680 Town Planners at this point probably should start running through the new tutorials that are coming out. At the plateau, Settlers can apply now the low-risk technology to these novel business problems. Town Planners can help automate, improve performance, and create enterprise-scale solutions.

01:24:49.840 The toy solution is now running Fortune 500 companies and handling your bank transactions. So, I told you earlier I'd offer comfort and caution. Let's start with a comfort: you might be worrying about whether your favorite technology is eroding underneath you. That Elixir is going to kill Ruby, and Phoenix is the new Rails.

01:26:36.440 I've seen Medium think pieces about it, so it must be true. Or that the tools you use are just garbage and outdated compared to the shiny stuff you're reading about in blog posts. Like, am I going to have to go buy a suit? Maybe you think you're broken or lazy because you’d rather keep working with the tools that you know than learn seven new programming languages in the next month.

01:27:55.560 For the last year, I've been working in a production Rails 2 app, and you know what? It solves a lot of problems for a lot of people. And it's full of problems that aren't at all related to it being on Rails 2. I'm also working in Elixir and Phoenix on a project, and you know what about that? I can't shake the feeling that if I’d just been using Rails, I’d be done by now a hundred times over.

01:29:23.440 It’s great—seriously, great—to learn new stuff, but we’ve got to stop the cycle of making people feel inferior for using the things that make them productive. Let me put a finer point on it: no one gets to make you feel ashamed of liking the stuff you like.

01:30:37.840 And when the shoe's on the other foot, please consider this and don’t yuck someone else’s yum. I’m not proud to say I’ve done this to a bunch of people. Now, for the caution: you can eventually be left behind and see your skills become commoditized and devalued.

01:31:35.680 If your job—like this lady here apparently—is to hold this other lady's cell phone briefcase thing, you might have stayed with the technology a little too long, or just literally just be RadioShack.

01:32:42.080 In the bouncy sports ball thing with the net, there’s a thing where you plant a strong leg and pivot around that. I suggest that you have one tech that you use to ship your production and something you do on the side for fun. If it catches for you, you do more with it, and if it doesn't, you swap out your side project; no harm done.

01:33:54.160 There’s the stuff you do to learn and the stuff you do to ship. If you follow this pattern, you rarely feel swung around by this cycle. You just use the tool that you learned more recently, more frequently for new problems.

01:35:07.680 I love Ruby, but I’m now a full-time JavaScript developer. The thing is, I didn’t really notice the change happen. There’s no dramatic exit. I didn’t get to write a Medium think piece, which I feel a little cheated about.

01:35:58.520 One last warning: there are technologies that bet the farm on hitting the peak big and hoping that carries them through. This almost never works unless you’re trying to raise sweet VC cash and disappear. I’m not talking about famous Meteor because they’d probably sue me, so we’ll call them Fier and Mamus.

01:37:40.160 You want to look for tech that has a vision that sees itself all the way through to that plateau—because personal exploration of tech follows that same pattern. You get into the Hello World phase, and you start with a tutorial, you get to Hello World, you’re excited, you have a simple not-ready-for-production app, but it works, and you know Kung Fu. You’re like, 'I did it! I have accomplished this technology! I know React; it happened!'

01:38:58.240 I did React Native, but that’s not really real-life, is it? Not when you have a problem to solve. So new stuff is awesome, but the trouble with buying in at the peak is those pesky expectations. We wind up stuck in a ditch inevitably, and we thought we’d be rocking and rolling.

01:40:12.720 Suddenly, our tool spike is turning into a much harder road. Have you ever built a proof of concept in like 3 weeks that took you six months or more to get to production? And you’re like, 'Yo, this is the same piece of software! What is happening?' Maybe that’s what they mean by a 10x programmer.

01:42:59.040 You slog through this trough with Rails. I promise you this happened to you in Rails. If you have forgotten it, try to remember! And you made it to the other side. So why would you do that again elsewhere? Why bother seeing some of these other technologies to your own personal plateau?

01:43:57.720 Well, clearly, you picked some other additional technology for a reason. Call it curiosity, intuition, philosophical alignment, whatever. But then the pain starts, and things get really rough. So why would you stick that out? Well, ponder this for a second.

01:45:55.240 The way our entire industry works has flipped upside down. The problems we’re asked to solve now, and even the reasons behind them, have changed dramatically over the last ten years. We’ve been swimming in this technology avalanche trying to stay on top and didn’t realize the fundamental shift that’s occurred.

01:46:45.720 UX drives technology now, not the other way around! The tools we built 20 years ago, and even 10 years ago, were designed to solve a different set of problems than we encounter today. So we need additional tools to manage this world of UX-driven architecture.

01:48:06.760 And people are creating these tools rapidly. A lot of our pain comes from trying to deal with the chaos that has ensued from this collective upsetting of our apple cart. Have you been doing this long enough to remember selling the idea of using jQuery? That sounds bonkers now, but that’s where client-side UX is headed.

01:49:32.560 And that explains the meteoric rises of tools like Rails and the more recent ascendent of JavaScript. I did some stuff in Ember on the side, and it felt good, and I liked it, so I felt comfortable betting on it.

01:50:24.640 Now, I’m encouraged that I’m starting to hear people call it boring. Your bet may be something completely different, but it’s important to understand why these bets are likely to pay off. Sometimes it does make sense to switch to something new, and some Pioneer types manage to ride this eternal wave every 18 months.

01:51:57.120 But if you are trying to ship things, it can trigger that eternal midlife crisis. If you notice this pattern in your work life, maybe check to see if you're not stuck betting on tools and technologies that target that peak.

01:53:42.800 The tools that have staying power, like Rails or Ember, tend to push through their 15 minutes of fame on Hacker News toward long-term productivity. I want so badly to ship stuff—that’s what I love. I thought if I just picked up Rails and then Ember that I’d be free from all of the hard parts.

01:54:49.120 But that’s not true. It’s not even possible. But I bought into it because that’s the cycle, and it even sounds like the promise. But that’s not the actual promise. Look at all the things I’m not doing; that’s not the promise. This is the promise: the real promise is about helping you reach that plateau.

01:55:54.080 On the plateau, you have time to focus. You have time to focus on things that have value—business value.

01:56:56.440 Got about ten more minutes left of this, so on the plateau, you have time to think. And you start thinking, huh, maybe my boss is an idiot. I’m not saying it’s true; I’m saying you can think about it. Maybe it’s just that you know that you can do better.

01:57:58.080 And since you focus on adding business value, you can afford to fire your boss. And then you do, and then you turn out okay.

01:58:57.560 And you get to go have your own midlife crisis the way that you want to have it. But that's another talk.

02:00:21.200 And that’s it for the next episode.

02:01:45.200 Do I have a minute to embarrass somebody? Uh, let’s see, can we get the... yeah, this guy.

02:02:05.000 Am I right? So ten—I don’t know, a million years ago—so it’s got to be about 2010 or about six years ago. A friend introduced me and said, 'Hey, I just started working at a company called Mosy. I have a friend named Mike Moore; he runs this programmer Meetup in Utah Valley at the Mosy office.' And I was like, 'That sounds horrible.'

02:03:30.960 I just was learning to program, and I thought I'm going to listen to a bunch of smart nerds be smarter than me. That sounds super fun, thanks! I went anyway, and there was a guy with a fez there. I kid you not! I was like, 'I don’t want to be here with Fez guy!' And this whole thing turns out Fez guy was not a regular.

02:04:55.200 He probably was a really cool guy; I just didn’t give him a chance. Mike was super intimidating. I was like, 'Oh my gosh, I think Eric Berry was there,' and all these people were so smart and so intimidating. It was my obviously first meetup, and I went back.

02:06:11.680 I’m like, 'Okay, I’m going to go back until I understand what people are talking about.' Mike specifically took interest in this annoying question from a newbie. He organized Mountain West Ruby, which was my first ever conference, which was incredibly scary to go to.

02:07:30.960 After a while of attending the meetups, he said, 'Hey, I think it’s time for me to step down, and I want you to take over organizing the Utah Valley Meetup.' I was like, 'Okay, what do I do?' And it was really scary for me, but it gave me the confidence to do a lot of other stuff.

02:09:30.960 He recommended and interviewed me for my first job as a full-time coder. And I completely blew it, I mean, big time! He walked out and said, 'Hey, you really did not sell yourself super well in there,' so that was frustrating.

02:11:30.960 But six months later, he got me another interview for the same job that actually took me away from him to Austin. He eventually helped invite me to help organize Mountain West one year.

02:12:04.960 He gave me one of my first-ever speaking opportunities at Mountain West JS. He’s literally been a shoulder for me to cry on, and you don’t know a man until you’ve sobbed into his shoulders, and his shoulders are perfect.

02:13:04.960 He’s given a lot to the community, but I just wanted to take one little slice of that and show you the kind of impact this conference and this person have had. Thank you, Mike! I love you. You’re the sparkle to my Twilight.