One Monday, while walking to the office you pass a little bakery with a window display. A beautiful looking danish catches your eye. The crust looks so light and fluffy, a generous dollop of jam in the middle, and the drizzle of icing sugar. So tempting, but you promised yourself to cut back on the snacks, and continue your way to the office.
Each morning, you walk past that same bakery and see a danish sitting there, just beckoning you... Finally, Friday morning comes around and you see that gorgeous danish waiting there. "I can't take it any more!" you scream to yourself and you give in, walk into the bakery and buy the danish. After the guilt melts away holding that beautiful danish, you take a bite... It's long since gone stale, having been sitting there since Monday.
The stale danish is how I view the Internet, and the marvelous source of information we, as software developers have come to rely on it for. When technology is new, the Internet provides a flury of information and experiences that the global software development community collectively accumulates. However, much of the time, that information isn't versioned, and often sources like blog posts & walk-throughs aren't even dated. As the technology matures, finding the information you need to solve a particular problem becomes a treasure hunt to find a fresh danish in a sea of stale ones. Working with JavaScript frameworks like React and it's supporting libraries like Redux in particular has proven extremely challenging time and time again. Every undated bit of information needs to be taken with a grain of salt, and it's compounded by the fact that with JavaScript, there are always a number of variations to do what should be relatively standard stuff, all conforming to different interpretations of "best practices".
Even normal consumers of information are getting tricked by the stale danishes floating around the web. Technologies like Google street view in particular are marvelous, but they require constant updates because as the world around us changes, the maps and camera images quickly become out of date. Using these services to assist with landmarks can be fraught with danger as you're looking for an intersection after a car dealership or restaurant that relocated six months ago. At least Google had the common sense to put dates on their imagery.
The stale danish is the one key reason that I would much, much rather work in the back end with technologies like .Net, Entity Framework, and SQL, than working in the front end with JavaScript libraries. I love working in the front end, solving usability issues and presenting users with useful views to data and features they need. I enjoy MVC, WPF, and had enjoyed Silverlight largely because the pace of change was a lot slower, and there were a handful of sources to find directly relevant information about the technologies and how to effectively use them.
JavaScript, and open source in general is far more volatile. While you may argue this makes it more responsive so that problems get solve more quickly, the real trouble is that everyone's perception of a problem is different, so there are a lot of "solutions" out there that are screaming on the web for validation. As a software developer, projects need to have a completion date so you do need to choose from those available options at the time, and commit to them. Having relevant and accurate information at hand through the life of the project is essential for when challenges do crop up. Ripping out X to replace it with Y isn't an option, and often the breaking changes from X v0.8 to X v0.9 prohibit the idea of upgrading, so when searching for possible answers and work-arounds to problems, it would be a wonderful if more articles and posts were versioned, or at least had a "Baked On" date listed.
