Had the same problem while trying to decide which Roborock device to get. There's the S series, Saros series, Q Series and the Qrevo. And from the Qrevo, there's Qrevo Curv, Edge, Slim, Master, MaxV, Plus, Pro, S and without anything. The S Series had S8, S8+, S8 Pro Ultra, S8 Max Ultra, S8 MaxV Ultra. It was so confusing.
I wait 1-3 months, but then update. It used to take way longer, because Amazon's Elastic Beanstalk platform would take longer to update, but I've now changed to Platform.sh and the transition should be easier.
It has been very backward-compatible (i.e. stuff that works in 8.n also works in 8.n+1; and unless you use exotic functions or are relying on special functionality, it should work for you, too).
Once I'm at 8.4, I would slowly update the code / syntax with rector and the assistance of phpstan.
For framework updates I wait 1-2 patch versions before updating, because of composer dependency problems and sometimes bugs do still find themselves into new releases (e.g. I would wait at least until Symfony 7.2.1 before upgrading from Symfony 7.1.x).
I use Symfony (PHP based framework) and it works fine. I've been able to get into Django (Python), Laravel (PHP), Java (Spring) and even Grails (Groovy) because they either had similar concepts or even similar syntax (I mostly do web development, so this is a very biased take).
Being a freelancer, I need to focus on what's marketable. Sure, Elixir will get me into a niche, but I will have way less projects to choose from. And when I start a project for a company, if I start with Elixir, I will also have a smaller pool of devs to recruit from. It's a chicken-and-egg problem.
Nowadays, if I start a project, I would try to build on monolith and full framework with a PaaS.
Unfortunately, most projects want to start out "the right way", which means separate backend (e.g. Java), separate frontend (React), rented server (e.g. Hetzner server) and custom deployment (some pipeline an outside agency built when they first started the project).
I'd rather spend 400 USD on tools each month, but then only need 1-2 full stack devs instead of 6-8 people (1 sys admin, 1-2 deployment, 2 backend, 2 frontend) and with all the overhead that comes with it.
Do you really find Java backends to be that great?
I don't think they're intrinsically bad, and Kotlin or Groovy can be nice, but I've always found the community and lack of open source tools to be wanting.
I've found myself to be much more productive in JavaScript/TypeScript or Python, in part because of the languages, but also because the open source libraries have been way better
I have another, different oddity. Whenever my colleague and I stand up (or also sit down?) on the desk, his Dell monitor would turn black for a few seconds. I don't remember the specifics, but I think it was mostly just the two of us, when other people say down if was fine.
Even if he's sitting on a different table, the moment I sit down his screen would blank for a few seconds then continue to work normally.
I also get electrocuted easily when I use the escalator. It almost doesn't matter what I wear, so it might have to do with my skin or it's conductivity? But that's just a wild theory that would need to be checked.
Edit: Some research seems to point to the static electricity from the chairs.
If they use a docking station, there’s a known issue with DisplayLink video output from gas spring chairs causing EMI spikes that disrupt the video signal momentarily when you sit down or stand up.
> “Surprisingly, we have also seen this issue connected to gas lift office chairs. When people stand or sit on gas lift chairs, they can generate an EMI spike which is picked up on the video cables, causing a loss of sync”
I think I was still in German mode, it's called "electric punch" (Stromschlag) if translated literally, my brain went the easy route and tried to find the closest match.
I took the WordPress-based / WooCommerce system and split it into 1) the Shopify system for admin stuff and also the whole payment system and 2) the "frontend" i.e. the consumer facing part BEFORE the payment (I used Symfony, similar to Laravel, but more modular and I was more familiar with it). Theoretically you could fetch all the product data via the Shopify API and then sync it automagically. But in the first iteration, we just copied some of the basic product data into a simple Symfony Admin backend and made a simple javascript-based checkout slide-out, and only when they were ready to pay, they would be forwarded to Shopify.
This way we would have full control of the user experience up to the point of purchase, and then Shopify would take over. I thought this was the best way I can deliver a performant website, while also being able to sleep well, because all the money stuff and all the customer data is handled by Shopify.
I was able to increase search engine traffic by 30% this way, reduce page size and increase page speeds and revenue increased significantly.
After 3 years, he decided he wanted to make it more "professional", so he fired me, I got none of the credit ("the search engine traffic must be because of better branding - and the page isn't up to my standards of aesthetics... yes, the designers who were supposed to deliver the designs kept stalling and delivered NOTHING and you had to just create something on the fly before the main selling season, and yes we had huge sales gains on the website and more traffic, but this was not because of the website"... they didn't change any of the marketing or any of their strategies, by the way.) So they hired an agency team with a project manager, designer, developer, marketing person; who then asked me to give them the source code from git so they can upload the code to their FTP server (!).
And they pretty much didn't change anything for a few years, everything looked the same. After like 4-5 years, they adjusted the design a bit, but still looked VERY similar.
I think it's more that it's a crap job market. Have been dev freelancing for about 10 years, used to be able to choose from a few projects within a couple of weeks of searching.
But the last 18 months have been hard. On some freelancing projects I was up against 80 or 120 other devs. (I live in Germany.)
Recruiting agencies have told me the same. I finally found 2 part-time projects after 6 months of search and will now try to wait our the dry period.
For my 12 year side project, I recently moved from Elastic Beanstalk after 6-7 years to Platform.sh, because "it just works" even more so and it was way easier to debug (EB just says "error in step 18_install_yarn" or something).
I use Symfony (Php) and have not used a full SPA after I retired AngularJS (v1) like 10 years ago. What people now call server side rendering (SSR) is just how Symfony works with its regular Twig templating language (heavily inspired by Django's templating language).
As I gained more experience, I rewrote it. Once from vanilla PHP to Laravel, then later to Symfony.
But maybe Symfony would be something like Linux Debian, has all the building blocks, it's modern but stable and well documented. Laravel is like Linux Ubuntu, it bases many things on Debian, but adds many things to make stuff a bit easier for the user. It's "shinier" and it has better marketing. You can add Debian stuff to Ubuntu, but you can't necessarily add Ubuntu stuff to Debian.
Symfony is more modular, you can add the components to any PHP project. Whereas Laravel uses many Symfony components and adds some syntactic sugar, but once you go into Laravel, it's difficult to stray away too far from the "Laravel way". Laravel uses many Symfony components, but Symfony can't easily use Laravel components.
Self-hosted Wordpress would maybe be comparable to a rooted Android phone. It has a very specific use case (for Wordpress it's fundamentally a Content Management System). You can add all sorts of plugins and additions. But it's also easy to accidentally break something. And once you added too many things, it might be difficult to update without breaking many things.
In the end, they're all Linux based, but living in very different ecosystems (just as Symfony, Laravel and Wordpress are PHP-based).
In programming terms, Symfony might be similar to Django (Python) or Spring Boot (Java), whereas Laravel is "cousins" with Ruby on Rails.
Server side rendering of React applications doesn't just refer to the fact that it's generated on the server like you do with PHP.
The main difference is that there are IDs that allow the client side code to seamlessly attach event handlers (this is called hydration) to the DOM - and that there is no difference between server and client side code.
In your case, you'd have to do that manually - a huge difference (speaking as someone who used to do that with jQuery).
I would argue adding JavaScript on top of Laravel will make you slower. You can use Blade as the templating engine (or how JS people would call "Server Side Rendering" but which has been default for most full stack frameworks). Otherwise you need to create 2 additional interfaces, one for backend and one for frontend. And an additional layer of error handling.
I personally prefer Symfony over Laravel because of it's modularity and extensibility, but Laravel has the edge on getting started quickly and available SaaS features (such as billing modules and stuff).
If you need SPA-ish features, you could use htmx and if you need some on-site interactivity, I like Alpine.js.
