Do Not Learn Frameworks – Learn the Architecture

I started with Rails many years ago, had absolutely no idea what I was doing. Was just googling for gems and snippets from Stack Overflow, if anything ever broke I was done.

A few years later I decided I was going to really dig deep into the meat of it and wrote my own framework in Clojure that we are still using to this day in production. It was incredibly liberating to know every nook and cranny of the framework because I had written it myself. I also figured out why so many decision had been made in other frameworks, it was a phenomenal learning experience.

I eventually realized that our super small team and I simply couldn't sustain keeping this super-custom framework maintained and updated, not with all the other work that needs to be done at the company. We moved most of our work to Haskell's Yesod framework, which has years of community work and incredible craftsmanship behind it. It's now pretty trivial to spin up a new application and have it reuse all of the components written for other apps in the same framework. I don't even bother with docs at this point, it's a lot more effective to stare at the source.

And then Haskell's Yesod gets abandoned when the core devs move to shinier things and nobody else is bothered, like several Clojure web frameworks that were touted back in the day...

And you realise that maybe updating your own framework when and were you needed it, was not that big of a deal actually....

Good companies want both good coders AND coders with experience in the language or the plateform they use.

The author appears to have solid understanding of the principles and it takes deep knowledge and experience to call out bubbles. Successful investors often take similar contrarian views, carefully weighing what is simply exuberance of the herd vs facts.

As you mention, time is required, to fully dig deep into someone's framework. At the end of the day, a framework is like software. you need time to learn it. when you use it in cases where you don't absolutely need it to do a job, you are affected by marketing or herd mentality.

'Everybody uses it so it must be right'. ex) MongoDB.

Everybody suddenly needed NoSQL. you started hearing recruiters ramble on about NoSQL and the urgent need to fill it. Then you start fiddling with it and you end up firing your entire team because they built their church on a questionable sand (MongoDB) and run into all sorts of problems.

I often feel like developers freely toss around frameworks or use new things because they are bored and want to try things differently. Ewww server side render pages are so 2005. I won't touch anything that isn't JS. No, I want this my blog built in Node.js so it can serve millions of yet to come visitors.

Again and again I'm reminded of turf wars where people's job rely on identifying with one set of philosophy even if they are as crazy as writing tests before you code and expect things to not fail.