Frameworks are great, but you have to spend a lot of time wading through the documentation and architecture. Why this is different than that framework and why this does something different than that framework, and why this framework solves something this other framework fucks up.

For a time I just started putting together my own stuff and then realized it was so custom, it was totally useless outside of a particular project. I've come around a little bit, but its frustrating when the whole industry jumps on a bandwagon, promotes the shit out of it and then some time later, they're onto something else and the cycle repeats itself.

The best example for this is Backbone.

It was one of the first JS frameworks I started fooling around with, along with Node and Express. Everybody thought this was the greatest thing ever. Now, less than a year or so after I first started dabbling with it, you can't find anybody still talking about it (even though its still a rock solid framework). Everything is now Angular, React and various other shiny toys. I would say the same thing about Knockout. People thought this was the next big thing, and now I can't find anybody promoting it anymore.

It's really a balancing act of picking the latest and greatest vs. picking the tried and tested. No one wants to learn something that'll be useless in a year. Alternatively if you forego learning anything new then you'll miss out on technologies that can actually help you.

For me, I don't really view learning things as wasted time. Even if I don't use some technology I learned a year or two ago, there's plenty of valuable lessons that can be learned from why things didn't work out.

It would get frustrating if I were learning all the wrong things all the time. So, I focus on the things that genuinely get me excited followed shortly by new technology that isn't completely fresh.