People on HN are always deriding the “tech hedonic treadmill”, but I find it interesting that this meme seems to have reached maturity in 2015, and the list of things they point to as “the new trendy thing this year” has been the same ever since: Some combo of Node.js, React, webpack, Docker and Kubernetes.

I think this meme was still fairly true then: Node was at risk of splitting into Node.js and IO.js, React was still new-ish and people were (rightfully) panicking over the drastic changes coming in Angular v2, Docker was still new-ish and there were arguments over whether Docker Swarm or Kubernetes was the future. But nowadays Node has stabilized, React and webpack have been comfortably dominant for years, Docker’s model of containers won out a long time ago and Kubernetes is there if you need it, but is mostly useful for people building a PaaS.

If people don’t want to learn these things, then fine, but I do wish the overall mood here would update to reflect the fact that we are now living in a much more stable time than when these memes were created.