As I get older, I just don't care about new technology

Maybe in terms of development, as you suggest, but definitely not in terms of player experience. For example, I'm able to play and enjoy games from the PS2 (and even the PS1), but games from the 2600 are essentially unplayable. I have a lot of nostalgia for computers and games from the 80s but I realize now that it's for the late 80s, around the time of the SNES.

Sometimes I think that 1990-1995 was peak computing, in terms of "the computer as a feeling". 25MHz single core, 1MB RAM, 100MB HDD, 9600 bps modem, 320x200 256 colors--you could get a lot done and yet every byte and cycle were precious and it was all understandable by a single person. If consumer hardware had stalled out there, we'd still be flying high, albeit with a text-only internet. Software would be more stable and there would be incentive to optimize and improve instead of amass and churn. In fact the only things I'd change in that list to make it simpler would be SSD instead of floppy/HDD and packet-switched internet instead of modem.

Don't get me wrong, as a consumer I would want to stall out a bit later, closer to 1GHz, 1GB RAM, 16GB SSD, 1Mbps always-on network, 1024x768 true color; but by that point the hardware is complicated enough that the software becomes unwieldy, too much for one person to grok fully, and the craft is lost to waste and bloat. For example, with 320x200x8, there's a certain magic of having byte-addressable video memory laid out in a way that directly corresponds to the screen pixels. You can still get evocative images but you have to care about each pixel. With 1024x768x24 you can waste 90% of the resources and be 'good enough'.

Typing? Get off my lawn.

Whereas a C gig today probably means embedded, or subsystem far away from the frontend churn. If I'm lucky they have unit tests. The Lindy path you were talking about.

So I opened up Android Studio yesterday to upgrade things and hopefully release a quick beta to shake things down. It's now the next day and I'm still weeding through compile-time and runtime errors caused through the upgrade.

I feel like every time I update Android libraries my code bloats out with extra conditionals and permissions checks, and generally makes my code more brittle.

Maybe this is just the nature of building a secure platform which has such a broad reach. I can't claim to know, but it sure sours the developer experience.

As a simple, non-commercial public transport app that I wrote mostly for fun and learning, it's hard to be movitated to fix it.

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt