James Worrell.au

The software world never seems to slow down ... forget stop. Progress on a number of fronts in the web development world are doing my head in.

Back in 1996 when I was knocking up my first web pages, life was simple. You had HTML 3.2, full stop. Then came along CSS and HTML 4. Ok - not too much to learn there. Add in VB Script for ASP pages, again, life is still pretty cruisey. Now?! Things are out of control. Microsoft are up to their 4th major version of .Net, then combine this with some of the other things I need to know: SQL 2008, ASP.Net MVC, Entity Framework, SOA architecture design, Azure, AJAX, Silverlight, WCF, WPF, Workflows, HTML5 .. the list goes on. Most of this stuff is still in beta for another few months, but the big problem is, most of it also completely changes how I need to write software going forward.

For example, up until a week ago I was getting ready to drop $100k on new servers, another $30k on fibre optic connections etc. Not a lot of point now, I can host the bulk the applications on the Azure cloud, maybe. Still learning what I can and can't do with this beast. So instead of dropping $5k a month on my own hosting platform, I can get it for about $250 a month. Sounds good to me.

But how to keep up the changing environment. I think I might crawl into a hole for a few years with what I know, actually deliver some applications, then worry about re-writing at the end. As it is, everything I've been working on for the last 4 years is looking like being remodelled so don't fall too far behind with where things will be in 5 years, and we haven't even finished it yet!