We Might Be Different Kind of Developers

March 5, 2024

A while ago I tweeted this:

I was wondering where my FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) comes from. There have been articles about React is this and that! A while after we hear about how's React Labs is going to change everything in React 19.

Then I see Qwikjs with all of the new improvements for the second version. Or I follow news around Solidjs, and I wonder how it's becoming the React I ever wanted. But after all, I'm like, there are too many options right now, I cannot even choose.

Next, I hear about the Local-first movement, and I suddenly decide to consider it for every application I'm going to write (spoiler alert: I don't write applications, mostly libraries)

The htmx discussion gets me to consider reading the htmx book. Honestly, I might not need to, but I'm just... curious. Unjs keeps innovating every day, and it just skyrockets my FOMO around how I'm supposed to keep up with everything those folks build.

Wow, a new runtime just showed up, by amazon, which I haven't heard its name that much in the industry around me, except AWS. We also have pkl, by apple, which is a new way to do configuration. Next we have the serverless horror stories, now I'm thinking of self-hosting.

All these technologies take part of my mind every day, thinking about how I'm going to adopt them. Or If I should adopt them or not, trying to find reasons based on different circumstances.

Each of these technologies in itself is not confusing, instead they're all exciting, but all the mental burden building up makes the combination really confusing to me. How I'm going to combine each of these, that's the question I have every day, or as an open source developer, how I'm going to jump on the hype train, most importantly.

The Cure

I was trying to find a solution for this feeling, the FOMO. No solution yet to be honest. Some may suggest removing twitter, but I enjoy it, it keeps me moving. All of that excitement, it comes with a cost, but at the end, each and every day I'm excited about all of that evolvement.

But when deeply looking into it, there might not be. I'm trying to find the best solution, that fits every situation. And that's exactly the mistake I'm making. I do not have a company that's worth million dollars. I don't even work in one, I'm just an open source developer. Finding the best tooling solution might not even make sense. That's not the part of technology that's fun to me, maybe it's an age thing also, but I don't like finding the one-fits-all solution, I love exploring. Part of what made me enjoy this 5-4 years journey, is trying different things and finding out how they behave.

Me and the circle I'm in, the open source devs, the devs who watch the twitter news eagerly, follow youtube videos around what tool came up the other day, are a different kind of developers I reckon. We're not trying to find the "right" solution for our own company or the company we work in. Or the product we build. It's just trying different solutions that gets us the excitement. At least that's how I feel it is for my fellow developers.

So being confused about the different tools and getting the perfect combination, might not be bad after all! So even though I'm going to build a product soon, I won't choose the tool I used the last time I built a product. I would choose something more alternative that seems more interesting, like Nitro, because It's a backend-only solution that I feel it's going to be fun.

The last time I built a product (which failed), I used Qwikjs, and I cannot imagine how much I enjoyed it, but this time if I'm going to build a UI, I might try the Waku / RSC implementation, not because I'm a team member, I still find Qwikjs smoother as a server first UI library compared to RSC. But I want to wrap my head around RSC right now, because, it's just more interesting at this time and I'm more curious around it.

I think I might need to have a mindset shift, that this game for me at this point of my career should be fun after all, and not something strict that I have to bet it'd still behave the same in the next 10 years anyway. As I said, this might be absolutely wrong for other groups and niches of developers.

I'm trying to learn about writing and also experimenting with different ways of doing it! Let me know how do you feel about this one. Here's my Twitter.