“the greatest danger you face is your mind growing soft and your eye getting dull.” ― 50 Cent, The 50th Law

The greatest danger to developers is to stop being curious, stop learning and stop keeping up with new technology. The day you stop learning is the day you start your journey towards retirement.

Slow death

How do you slowly make development harder? falling behind the latest changes one day at a time. The environment evolves and your skills need to change with it.

I worked with a Java developer who stopped taking an interesting in new versions of Java, new frameworks, new best practices and just came to work, wrote the code needed and went home. He slowly found development harder and needed more help understanding frameworks and projects. Eventually they couldn’t find a project for him to work on and he become increasingly scared of new projects.

Developers are craftsman, you are never the master and always the student. There will constantly be new languages, new ways of doing things, new services, new tools, new best practices, and you have to be interested enough to keep investing time to learn.

Like the frog slowly being boiled, the developers who stop learning are slowly being boiled

“Standing still is the fastest way of moving backwards in a rapidly changing world.” — Lauren Bacall

Dynamics on premise versus Dynamics 365 online

When Dynamics 365 online came out it was inferior to the on-premise version and you couldn’t do the same level of complexity. Many developers chose to not invest the time in learning Dynamics 365 online. Slowly Online functionality caught up and then with Azure, no code solutions (Power Platform) and Microsoft pushing it hard, it become the number one choice of customers..

When online caught up it was very appealing to customers to choose online because Dynamics 365 is a service and it means that people could get rid of their servers and the technical experts who look after those servers. Microsoft would guarantee to keep the service up all the time, Microsoft would stop virus and deal with security.

Companies who didn’t change with environment found themselves behind, they hadn’t trained people to have skills for online projects; they had no experience in online projects.

Those companies who didn’t keep learning were left behind. Like starting a race and giving everyone else in the race a head start.

No code revolution

Microsoft is moving into business applications and has created a powerful no code/low code functionality with Power Automate.

In the early stage some people ignored it, used old workflows or continued writing C# code and JavaScript code.

The next step Microsoft added connectors and kept improving Power Automate and then it was a powerful tool that could almost match the functionality of C#. The cost to create and maintain customisations was lower and could be developed by Power users /citizen developers.

If you weren’t interested or didn’t learning then you started the race behind all those who jumped on it at the start. If you don’t go down this route then you are swimming against the Microsoft tide.

Survival of the fittest

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent; it is the one most adaptable to change.” — Charles Darwin

What I’m talking about is adapting to the changes in environment, if you don’t adapt then you become less effective in the new environment. The longer you resist changing the less effective you become in the changed environment.

Your skills were great in the previous environment but the development environment has upped the version, moved online and is changing to low code solutions. If you aren’t keeping up then you are slowly becoming less useful.

Stay curious

Take opportunities to be more curious and open, explore the truth. Imagine you don’t know anything. Expand your knowledge and experience and embrace new functionality as a new opportunity. Expose yourself to different ideas, go outside of your comfort zone.

When you stop learning, you start to become less adapted to the environment and will slowly become less useful.

The rate of change is speeding up and evolving your skills as technology advances will happen more frequently and be more important. Read the article below to see why

Google Director Of Engineering: This is how fast the world will change in ten years