Involuntary Changes
You often see tweets about how (web) developers need to be continually learning, how frontend technology evolves so quickly and it’s hard to keep up. I feel this from time to time, but I also think there is a solution to this problem:
Really learn the JS language itself. But also learn HTML and CSS really well. This will help anyone deal with the constant change in webdev.
Libraries and frameworks are accelerators, not necessarily a shortcut or a way to avoid learning the underlying tech
One thing I have the hardest time with is my tools changing without me wanting them to. I use PHPStorm multiple hours every day, and even though I know, I only use a percentage of the features it brings, I use these efficiently. Whenever JetBrains decides to rebuild a part of the application, they disrupt my workflow. Maybe the keyboard shortcuts that I have memorized don’t work in the same way, or the UI has changed significantly.
After the recent changes to the VCS/git integration within PHPStorm, I lost the ability to navigate the VCS window. Somehow multiple repositories are grouped by branch names (master anyone?), (third-party) repositories I have not added as registered repos show up, I can’t find a simple overview of changes by repository, etc.
if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it
I don’t even know if this applies in this case because I never looked too deep into the VCS part of PHPStorm. Perhaps it was broken; maybe a lot of developers are happy that this part of the application finally got fixed. I used it in a specific way, and now I’m not able to do this anymore.
This type of involuntary change is what disrupts my day the most and probably costs me the most time and energy. It’s not that this is something I was looking forward to learning, so I don’t get enjoyment from understanding how it works.