Chapter 17: The Technology Graveyard
Pour one out for CoffeeScript. For Backbone. For Flash. For every technology that was once somebody’s entire identity — and then, one day, wasn’t.
There’s a place where technologies go when they die. Not a physical place — a psychological one. It’s the mental shelf where you put the things you used to know, the tools you used to define yourself by, the ecosystems you used to call home.
If you’ve been in this industry for more than a few years, you have entries in the graveyard. Maybe it’s a language that lost its momentum. Maybe it’s a framework that got supplanted. Maybe it’s a platform that pivoted or a company that got acquired or a tool that the community simply moved on from. Whatever it is, it was once central to your professional life, and now it’s… not.
And if you’ve walked through a technology graveyard, you know something that newer developers don’t: everything dies. Everything. The question isn’t whether your current stack will eventually decline. It’s what you’ll do when it does.
A Brief Tour of the Departed
Let’s walk through the graveyard. Not to mock the dead — these were good technologies that served real needs — but to notice the pattern.
Flash. There was a time when Flash ran the internet. Interactive websites, games, animations, video players — if it moved on the web, it was probably Flash. Flash developers were a vibrant, well-paid community with conferences, books, and a distinct identity. Then mobile happened. Steve Jobs wrote his open letter. HTML5 matured. And over the course of a few years, an entire ecosystem that employed hundreds of thousands of developers went from ubiquitous to obsolete.
jQuery. The library that made JavaScript bearable. For years, “knowing JavaScript” basically meant “knowing jQuery.” It papered over browser inconsistencies, made DOM manipulation pleasant, and was so widespread that it was included on something like 70% of all websites. Then browsers standardized. Frameworks emerged. And jQuery went from essential to unnecessary, not because it was bad, but because the problems it solved stopped being problems.
CoffeeScript. A beautiful little language that compiled to JavaScript and addressed, for its time, legitimate complaints about JavaScript’s syntax. It had a passionate community. It was the default in Rails. It was the “right” way to write JavaScript for a window of several years. Then ES6 arrived and incorporated many of CoffeeScript’s best ideas directly into JavaScript, and the reason to use CoffeeScript evaporated almost overnight.
Backbone.js. The first major JavaScript MVC framework. It taught a generation of developers how to structure client-side applications. It was the technology behind some of the most ambitious web applications of its era. Then Angular arrived, then React, and Backbone’s approach — elegant as it was — became a historical artifact.
Perl. Once the duct tape of the internet. CGI scripts, text processing, system administration — Perl was everywhere. “Perl programmer” was a well-defined and well-compensated identity. Then Python ate Perl’s use cases one by one, and the Perl community shrank from a major force to a niche.
Objective-C. The language of iOS and macOS development for over a decade. If you built Apple apps, you wrote Objective-C. Then in 2014, Apple introduced Swift, and within a few years, writing Objective-C went from “the only option” to “maintaining legacy code.”
The list goes on. Silverlight. ColdFusion. Delphi. ActionScript. MooTools. Prototype.js. Each of these was, at its peak, somebody’s entire professional identity. Each of them faded.
The Five Stages of Technology Grief
When a technology you’ve identified with starts to decline, you go through something that looks remarkably like the classic stages of grief. Not literally — nobody is dying — but the emotional pattern is recognizable.
Denial. “It’s not really declining. The reports are exaggerated. There are still plenty of jobs. The community is still active. The new version is going to fix everything.”
Anger. “The new thing isn’t even that good. People are just chasing trends. They don’t understand what they’re giving up. The industry is full of hype-driven idiots who can’t appreciate solid engineering.”
Bargaining. “Maybe if the community rallies. Maybe if we get better marketing. Maybe if we integrate with the new ecosystem. Maybe if we write more blog posts about why our thing is still relevant.”
Depression. “I wasted years on this. Everything I learned is useless now. I’m too old to start over. The industry left me behind.”
Acceptance. “It was a good tool. It served me well. The skills I built aren’t gone — they’re underneath, transferable, ready for the next thing. Time to move on.”
If you recognize yourself in the earlier stages, that’s okay. The stages aren’t linear, and acceptance doesn’t mean everything before it was wrong. You were right to love the technology you loved. You were right that it was good. The grief is about the loss of identity, not the loss of the technology itself — and identity grief is real and valid.
The Survivors
Here’s what’s interesting about the technology graveyard: the developers who survive their technology’s decline almost always describe the experience as, ultimately, positive. Not the initial shock — that’s painful. But the long-term result.
Because when you’re forced to move on from a technology you’ve identified with, you discover something: you’re still you. The skills are still there. The instincts are still there. The problem-solving ability, the debugging intuition, the architectural sense — all still there. The technology was the vehicle, and now you need a new vehicle, but the driver is the same.
Flash developers who transitioned to web standards found that their design sense, their animation intuition, and their understanding of interactive media transferred beautifully. They weren’t starting from scratch. They were expressing old skills in a new medium.
Objective-C developers who learned Swift found that their deep knowledge of Apple’s frameworks, their understanding of memory management, and their UI design sense carried over almost entirely. The syntax changed. The developer didn’t.
This is the most concrete evidence for the thesis of this book: you are not your stack. Because when the stack goes away and you’re still standing, still capable, still building things — that’s proof that the value was in you all along.
Preemptive Wisdom
You don’t have to wait for your technology to decline to learn this lesson. You can learn it preemptively, by internalizing a simple truth: whatever stack you’re using right now, it will eventually be in the graveyard. Maybe in five years. Maybe in fifteen. Maybe in thirty. But it will happen.
This isn’t pessimism. It’s realism, and it’s actually quite freeing. Because once you accept that the technology is temporary, you stop over-investing in it emotionally. You can love it without being it. You can go deep without going all-in. You can enjoy the community without needing it to be permanent.
And you can start investing more in the things that won’t be in the graveyard: your fundamental skills, your adaptability, your relationships, your understanding of how software works at a level beneath any particular tool.
Honoring the Dead
There’s one more thing worth saying about the technology graveyard: the technologies there deserve respect.
It’s easy, from the vantage point of whatever’s current, to look back at old technologies and see only their limitations. “Can you believe people used to write Perl?” “I can’t imagine building anything with jQuery today.” This is ungenerous and also historically ignorant.
Those technologies were innovations in their time. They solved real problems that the technologies before them couldn’t solve. They advanced the craft. They gave countless developers their start in the profession. They created communities that enriched people’s lives.
And the people who built their careers on those technologies? They’re not relics. They’re veterans. They’ve been through something that many current developers haven’t yet: the experience of watching their world change and adapting to the new one. That experience is valuable, and the developers who have it are often the calmest, wisest people in the room — because they’ve already learned the lesson that everyone else will learn eventually.
The technology graveyard isn’t a cautionary tale. It’s a history lesson. And the lesson is: the tools change, the developers endure, and the skills that matter most are the ones that can walk from one grave to the next without looking back.