This helped me: Nobody asks a professional violion player to "just" switch to the cello, because the orchestra is missing one. Yes, there are many musicians who are proficient in multiple instruments, and yes, the underlying music theory is the same and maybe even the playing mechanics might be very similar (e.g. within strings or winds).

A few years ago I made a conscious decision that - at least during my remaining professional career - I will not switch to a new programming language anymore. Instead, I intend to keep specializing in Java. I embrace the fact that in 20 years I will be today's (Assembly|Fortran|C|...)-specialist. I do enjoy reading about other language features. I applaud the people at the cutting edge, experimenting with new stuff, and I am glad that Java is slowly incorporation some of those innovations. Every LTS release (2-3 years), I enjoy learning the curated set that Oracle's language architects decided to add.

This decision helped me tremendously with the fear of missing out on the latest and greatest.

Learn as you develop. I've been there, I've felt like I'm constantly switching techs because my app should have the most bleeding edge stuff.. And in the end I always felt overwelmed at the sheer amount of frameworks/libs coming out every year, or at how the larning curve of each tech didn't allow me to actually develop because I couldn't get past the "Researching and trying out tech before marrying a technology" phase.

The thing is: You A) Don't need to learn the newest things if all you want is to create a cool app. And B) Won't get anything from learning about building apps without actually building them.

Maybe you do need to get off HN, but I recommend just browsing HN safely and knowing that there'll be time to learn these new things if you learn them through making cool stuff. If your priority is to make apps, these new frameworks shouldn't bother you so much. You can make a nice app just with Flask.

But I do feel old too. I used to think Angular was the hottest thing.. Now I hardly enjoy it lol but that's because my Angular-married colleagues use very outdated practices, which were "modern" a few years ago.

Don't judge your insides by other people's outsides.

I like that. I'd not heard that line before and wanted to find the source. Surprisingly, Rob Lowe heard it from someone in AA.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNQcFjIOfCE

I feel you. Tooling for programming often seems to presume that programming is your primary focus and that you can afford to spend time every month keeping up with changes. For a small passion project the overhead of this churn eats a large fraction of the time budget, not to mention the demotivation of realizing how much energy you are spending to essentially tread water.

Whereas with art or math or writing projects I can come back to old notes decades later and basically pick up where I left off.

If every month comes out someone from nowhere with the latest and best, what this really means is that its is really not the best! People nowadays put together two shiny things and go around the world saying they have the best thing ever. It is just silliness. Stop paying attention to that and stick to well tested and proven technologies.

That's just the nature of our work.

Anyway what worked fine yesterday isn't necessarily a bad choice today.

The secret is stop using frameworks and use just libraries (even the latter with parsimony)

What libraries do you use for python webapps, at least for url routing, etc?

Not into Python, but Google suggest me this https://routes.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ for routing.

cheers! Will take a look.

Yes, frameworks call you, while you call libraries.

Time to write your own framework!

just follow your heart <3 take a breath, just do what you love and makes you happy.

It’s not you getting old, it’s you going tired of the pretentiousness of that pervades the industry right now.

I worked on some REALLY big Flask projects over my carrer and I came up with my rule for it:

"Any sufficiently large Flask project contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Django."

Just sticky with Django. It's stable, well-maintaned and includes most batteries out-of-the-box.