The new supersedes the old at a frenetic pace: desktop PCs rendered typewriters obsolete, BlackBerries were routed by IPhones etc.

Similarly, we’ve seen the advent of many Javascript libraries and frameworks. I can barely name the new stuff, let alone dabble in them: Svelte, Vue, Angular, React, Elm, Alpine, Stimulus, and SuperNovae JS? (Ok, I made the last one up). What’s the difference between them? Why should I choose one over the other, or even use them in the first place? ES5 (or is it ES2015) came and went. Javascript EcmaScript has gotten to the stage where it is now almost pleasant. Kids these days probably have never even heard of JQuery. What about bundlers, transpilers, PostCSS? Cloud computing and containerisation? Kuber-what?

I began to panic and fret: Oh Lawd, I have not studied all the latest pull requests on Rails, and third party gems. Rails 7 and Ruby 3 are at the gates! Fielding’s seminal thesis is still unread, nor have I gone through Jeremy Evans’s latest book etc.

And someone on HackerNews said that Rails’s no longer relevant, it’s slow, and doesn’t scale? OMG, have I wasted my life on a dying framework? Anguished Panic. Should I ditch it for SuperSexy JS and integrate my apps with machine learning and block chain - stuff which everyone venture capitalists go ga-ga over? Like Johnny in the Godfather I sobbed:

“What do I do? What do I do?”

…but I remembered my friend’s words, and my father’s advice:

“Ben: (i) work hard, and (ii) just be useful”

Technology is but a tool to solve a commercial problem. You don’t have to panic when when HackerNews provocateurs start prognosticating doom or if VCs accuse you of not changing the universe with your simple app. Simply solve a small problem and the rest will take care of itself - including the cash flow part. Or to keep it simple:

Just. Be. Useful.