Stay close to the heart (or to the tech you chose)

It’s amazing when you find a tool that fits your needs, that closes the gaps you’ve seen on the code you’ve been writing. And then, you start to use it for every problem you find. You have a hammer and you’re looking for nails.

But then there’s the crisis. You have some problems that the framework can’t solve anymore or you app has grown and all tutorials you find are not helping you improve the structure of an app that large. Or worse, you find some texts, but they contradict themselves.

If you’re not careful and diligent soon you will start to see different patterns from different developers emerging and what use to be so tidy and nice becomes something that has grown too fast and is out of control. You need to put an end to it. (Oh god, I’m not talking about a rewrite)

This is the moment where you’re tempted to break apart from the tool that served you so well and start to create your own pattern,. You need to set how the app is expected to work and boundaries within every developer in your team needs to work. That is expected and can even be a nice experience. Whenever you have to that, stay close to the heart (or to the tech you chose).

You need to adapt and change your work. It doesn’t matter if you’re using Ruby On Rails, React, Angular or another framework, you need to build on top of it and you should follow the patterns and standards set by the framework. This will help you immensely in the future, otherwise you will be constantly fighting with it and every new release will be require a lot of effort to update your app. So make the changes you need to do and whenever you have a choice to create something different or stay close to your chosen tool, unless there’s a very good reason to change stay with it, embrace it.