Slow development
Over the last days I have found it interesting to follow the thread on Reddit regarding the direction Laravel is heading.
I am not using Laravel a lot myself, so I follow it rather from the perspective of general software – or even company – development. Simply seeing the fact that a lot of long-term users slowly long back to simpler times. Some even ask straight up for suggestions on Laravel 5-like frameworks out there.
In a software sense, I draw some parallels between the Laravel situation to my own experience with Craft CMS, which I've used a lot the last 7 years. Already back with the introduction of Project config back in Craft 3.1 I felt it switched from being a very simple CMS I could co-work with designers and non-tech people on small to medium sized sites in a very lean way. We could both edit and modify CMS fields on the go, and it made for a very frictionless way of working.
The optional project-config soon became non-optional and have been a source of many headaches since. Most have been solvable and probably – as the reddit post also points out – just points towards myself (and my colleagues) lack of technical expertise. As the OP writes: "People will probably downvote me for this and say it's a skill issue, and maybe it is..".
Even if it is a skill issue, it's an interesting phenomenon. Updates and incremental improvements are often only thought of in a positive light. "great, new features!". But everything comes at a cost.
Another CMS system I use, which I feel stand out in the matter of slow and steady gradual and highly thought-through development is Kirby CMS. I heard in a podcast about a year ago from its founder something that has stuck with me to this day, which I feel shows a different thought process entirely. Since the podcast is in German (and I'm not even German myself, but know enough to get by) I'll summarize the essence:
In development it’s often tempting to scrap all of the work and start new. But the long term view is important. For Kirby 2 everything was written from scratch. It was so tempting and nice to use new tools, tech stack, code editor and everything around it. But this was something he (Bastian) called a big mistake, and definitely nothing he repeated again for versions going forward. The main captivating idea that stuck for me was the line "thinking like a gardener". It requires patience and gives a different type of satisfaction than the "flashy new tools"-direction, and is something I find very noble.
Unfortunately consumerism and the fast-paced world we live in has no time for slow development. Most small and slower moving projects dont survive. The really little content management system called Perch CMS back in the day was so much fun, but ultimately did not have enough buyers to keep going. Founders, investments and a ton of features would probably have kept the company alive, but to what cost? It would then have resulted in a completely different product in the end, and most likely it would have been worse.
Even though it feels like a losing battle, I cheer for the slow and steady ones out there. But maybe it's just me getting old.