It’s interesting to hear what others like to look at during their spare time, like setting up Temporal clusters or looking at frontend frameworks built atop five other frameworks built on React. I guess the thinking is that since we use it for our jobs, it’s helpful to keep abreast of these technologies.

Not me. Not any more. Back in the day I may have though similar. I may even have had a passing fancy at stuff like this, revelling in its complexity with the misguided assumption that it’ll equal power (well, to be fair, it would equal leverage). But I’ve been burned by this complexity one to many times. Why just now, I’ve spent the last 30 minutes running into problem after problem trying to find a single root cause of something. It’s a single user interaction but because it involves 10 different systems, it means looking at 10 different places, each one having their own issues blocking me from forward progress.

So I am glad to say that those days are behind me. Sure, I’ll learn new tech like Temporal if I need to, but I don’t go out looking for these anymore. If I want to build something, it would be radically simple: Go, Sqlite or PostgreSQL, server-side rendered HTML with a hint of JavaScript. I may not achieve the leverage these technologies may offer, but by gosh I’m not going to put up with the complexity baggage that comes with it.