Experience has taught me that if you want to get something done, you need to stay off the bleeding edge, or at the very least only drag yourself to the bleeding edge at controlled increments.

The only thing that should be changing often is YOUR code. Everything else should be as stable as possible.

What I find works best is playing leap frog: * your code is unstable / upgrade nothing * your code is stable, stop changing it and upgrade things one at a time

test suites / regressions are a must.