The Update Treadmill

Beta Stories — Episode 06 Your software worked on Friday. You ran npm update on Monday. It no longer works on Monday. Nothing in your code changed. Not a single line. The platform moved underneath you. One does find it rather charming that the industry calls this "progress." The Promise "Ship early, iterate fast, embrace change." Agile taught an entire generation that stability is something to overcome. Sprints replaced milestones. Continuous deployment replaced releases. The word "done" quietly left the building and has not been seen since. The ecosystem took the hint. Angular ships a new major version every six months. Eighteen major versions in ten years. Each with breaking changes, each with an 18-month support window, each politely informing you that the version you spent three months migrating to is now approaching end of life. You are not building software. You are servicing a subscription to your own framework. The build tools followed suit. Grunt was the standard in 2013. Gulp