Jekyll and Hyde: the emotional rollercoaster of technical adoption
Nov 22 2023
Originally posted on github.io
If you can read this it means that I'm successfully running jekyll on my macbook air m2, which means I have around 60 open tabs, the fruits of searches such as:
- Failed to install ruby 3.2.2 on M2 Pro with macOS Ventura 13.3
- RVM - Error running '__rvm_make -j8' rvm install 2.5.5 ...
- Error running '__rvm_make install'
I kept my old intel macbook air as long as I could hold out, and in my last position working on OSX, held out on moving to an m1 macbook to forestall just this kind of sanity-draining pitched battle. I find the emotional rollercoaster of encountering issues wrangling a new or newly-required technology follows the arc:
- Naive optimism: perusing the set of features you'll soon be able to enjoy
- Excitement: beginning the installion and configuration process
- Moderated enthusiasm: dealing with the first issues
- Frustration: as each solution to the issues encountered are fruitless
- Incredulity: as it seems there is just no way to perform this seemingly routine task that hundreds of thousands of users seem to have no issue with
- Blind rage: in which caution is thrown to the wind and any and every possible fix is attempted with little regard for future consequences
From there, we have three possible outcomes:
- Realisation: the fix is discovered, it's pretty obvious in retrospect, but the payoff is nowhere near the effort of finding it
- Tolerance: a workaround is reached that allows us to progress, and the annoyance of accepting a suboptimal solution will last around a day and never be thought of again
- Bitterness: nothing worked, and forever will this framework/technology be tainted by this experience
I eventually abandoned up installing rvm and went with Homebrew ruby which means I'm limited to the latest version, and no gemsets unfortunately. However, jekyll is installed and happily serving away.
Anyway, through the frustration of rvm hell, it all made me somewhat nostalgic. I used to love ruby. I'd recently joined REA Group, going to work meant working with incredibly talented, personable people in a truly agile fashion. From Java, and Rational Functional Tester I moved to ruby, Cucumber, and the dizzying cornucopia of gems that made just about anything achievable in a few lines of code. I did the koans and marvelled at the more than one way mantra. I wrote a synching file management utility in ruby that tackled my growing .mp3 problem. I wrote a to-do list manager in ruby. I parsed and generated spreadsheets and scraped websites. I essentially wrote my own single serving 'myfitnesspal', coupled with garmin and fitbit scrapers, and dealt with the ensuing hair loss wrangling the rails assest pipeline.
Well. From perl to ruby to javascript - it's exciting, blazing fast and bleeding edge one day, then legacy the next. I can recommend attempting to revive an old dev environment to temper the excitement of technical adoption.