Ask HN: With such fast changes in technology, how do you update your skillset?

Could you elaborate more on this?

Whether that is possible depends on the definition of "mastery" that you use, and how broadly you construe "all".

TL/DR: Even generalists have become much more specialized over time.

Consider that "web design" circa 1996 used to include project management, end-to-end development, PR, search engine placement, graphic design, copy writing/editing, information architecture, browser testing, server administration, domain registration, email configuration, etcetera, etcetera.

Over the past two decades, these tasks and many more besides have swollen to bursting, splitting into entire subdisciplines (some of which have endured, others not so much) and in some cases re-merging into new hybrids.

There is no way for anyone to maintain more than passing familiarity, much less competency, with every aspect of building and launching a non-trivial website (much less a web application). At best, we'll wing it on personal projects, or even skip major .

These days, what passes for a generalist is the "full-stack developer", which pretty much leaves off everything that doesn't have to do with code, or outsources tasks like design to 3rd-party services (eg. Netlify), libraries (eg. Bootstrap), themes, and so on.

I expect this trend to continue and even accelerate, so don't drive yourself nuts trying to keep up with the developments across everything you do today. I guarantee that whatever you consider to be the set of skills a generalist should understand now, it will get narrower over time (but not shorter), and we will have as many kinds of generalist as there are specialists today.

I am pretty sure that the "serverless" trend will lead to a new breed of "middleware developer" that works on various sorts of smart caching proxies, for example.

My advice is to try and be strategic in the things you drop and no longer keep up with, and keep the things that you do maintain competencies in adjacent to each other and to one or two main areas of expertise.

Speaking as a confirmed cynic, that seems overly cynical. ;-)

The problems being solved by the web framework hamster wheel are those of rising bars for usability and speed, with measurable in $$$ effects (ie. an extra 1s delay could increase shopping-cart abandonment rate by 1.5%). Which matters a lot more at web-scale.

So, these trendy frameworks are solving problems that most developers shouldn't worry about (it is premature optimization) but that matter a great deal to the companies that release them (Google: Angular and Polymer; Facebook: React and Flux; etc.). OTOH, it is tempting to tap into of all the engineering effort that goes into libraries like these. You just have to know where to stop before sinking into the HammerFactoryFactory mire. ;-)

Smart devs know this and cultivate their personal repetoire.

For example in the veeeery first days of .NET I had the opportunity to build a nice internal application for a client. Of course I didn't have a .NET library - the tech was just coming out of beta - but Microsoft was nice enough to provide a bunch of "example code" and "starter sites" to give all us noobs some patterns we could work from - at least most of the skeleton of a working, database back-ended website with a working security model.

From this .NET project it was easy to find another, and now I had a complete .NET library with solutions to all kinds of problems - how to do doc management, how to solve image resizing problems in .NET, how to talk to all kinds of heterogeneous systems using .NET, how to implement webservices, etc. because I'd built these once. With that toolbox I could easily solve all kinds of other problems with only a little creative remodelling of the skeleton app.

Then in 2007 when I jumped into OSS I got to start an all-new library building solutions on the LAMP stack. By 2009 I had a nice little library built up again.

The pattern is amenable to any software tech. Every project builds from the last one, if you do it right.

Of course, that is in part by design.

If you are delivering solution X that is just an instance of iteration Y of system Z with a few customer-specific tweaks, Agile methods will work just fine in combination with GANTT charts, and teams that are engaged regularly in that sort of work aren't too likely to object.

However, as soon as a task is a known unknown (that is, a well characterized problem with an understood though as-yet nonexistent solution) requiring new code that isn't just a variation on familar themes (ie. whatever is the equivalent of a CRUD web application for your industry), you start having to deal with uncertainty and risk (which humans are very bad at reasoning about). GANTT charts can make things worse because they foster a false sense of control (padding time estimates by x% for example feels like it helps, for example). And if anything in your critical path is a known unknown, your timeline expectations, however consensus-driven and reasonable as they may be, are likely to get smashed to smithereens, and all a GANTT chart is going to do is tell you when your carefully constructed schedule is starting to slip.

Throw unknown unkowns into the mix (from "we haven't yet figured out how to solve this" all the way to "are we even solving the right problem"), and timelines become entirely fictional.

I am not aware of any chart format that incorporates this sort of risk and uncertainty well (FogBugz for example, which incorporates probability and risk based on an estimator's past track record, basically just sticks that data into a chart's tooltips)

Now, if you are willing to mitigate these risks by basing your timeline around deadlines for handoffs with the understanding that what gets handed off is "best effort working system in available time" (in which case continuous integration/delivery is your best friend) that's a different matter, but that just isn't how most projects are concieved or managed. Yet.

BTW, related to all this is the conflict between feature-based and time-based approaches to software releases.