Let's make things that don't break anymore
Make future proof things
Watching the interview on youtube about the impressive (pun intended..) letterpresses studio p98a from Erik Spiekermann I learned that the presses they use are still the same as when they were made like 50 years ago. At 3:10 Erik said one thing that triggered me: "We still have the machines because they dont't break, ever."
And it hit me: So much things we make or buy today is not made to last anymore. You know it's true.. The moment warranty expires your equipment starts to fail on you and is doomed to die on you in the near future. Toasters do this, phones, computers but even toys and so much
Webdevelopment is infected to
Same goes for webdevelopment. Just check the lifespan of frontend frameworks. jQuery has been around a while but interaction frameworks seem to follow up on each other at and accelerating rate. LESS & Grunt used to be all hot, but a few years later Grunt & Gulp are used to run most of the automation and now postCSS is peeking around the corner. A project created a few years ago might be hard to get going since
There's hope
Making websites we have a few rock solid basics which, in my opinion, should be cherished and protected: Whatever bleeding edge software renders our site, the output is still HTML & CSS. And that precious markup has survived since the very beginning of the web. The markup we make now would still be rendered quite allright by a browser made for the very first era of the web. CSS has evolved a lot more, but all basics are still there. I don't think any essential parts of the first CSS specs have really been removed. About JS I'm not sure yet, that has really evolved. It had to. Fact is that it is one of the driving forces behind the web from almost the beginning.
Building future proof projects is easy
Now looking at everyday projects, there's a lot being made to work for now but it's not made for the future. But creating code that will survive changes of framework is not hard. All you have to do is consider what you're doing every once in a while. Picture a colleague or Github contributor working on your code and ask yourself if he'd know what's going on and the the first steps for future proof coding are done. That easy.
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Let's take care, and make (or buy) things that break anymore.