Day 190: Dead Tech

I’m currently working on a presentation called “how to side project” for a friend’s speaker series, and I was looking through my old git repos.

I saw that in 2013, I did a rewrite of webtimer (originally written in 2011) using the two hot technologies that I had picked up around that time: Angular and Coffeescript.

Thankfully, I never shipped it because I’m realizing that the original code written in vanilla Javascript has stood the test of time way better than the newer codebase. If I were to work on webtimer again, I’d have a much easier time working with the monolithic, plain JS files comopared to trying to remember how Angular directives and scope worked as well as trying to parse Coffeescript.

This got me thinking: Will I be able to understand the code that I’m writing today in 9 years? Will React and Typescript be relevant then? Would build tools like webpack and babel still work or would they be obsolete like so many of the build tools that preceded them?

Given the pace of change in web development, I feel like my modern, fancy code will be built on the corpses of long-defunct projects by 2029. That kind of bums me out.