Well, this kind of insanity made me step back 10 steps and invest some time (almost a year by now) into the "classics" so to speak.

Inspired by Crockford's talks in which he mentioned a couple of times the lack of history and historical knowledge among developers, I suddenly remembered that I got an education in humanities before I even went into programming and really did start with the classics - Greeks and Romans and Philosophy - and I asked myself why on earth I never really considered doing something similar in computing. (Someone called it in some article I've sadly forgotten the Oxford way - you learn Latin and Math and from there you can learn anything anyways ;)

So I decided to ignore all fashions, new things, upcoming frameworks and such for some time until I got what I would consider (totally subjectively) a solid foundation (not there yet, will probably take another year at least) of knowledge.

I personally decided to define "classics" along the lines of "knowing Unix and its history and concepts well" (re-learning shell and commandline wizardry on top), "understand decent C and Assembler", "becoming familar with the influential languages of important concepts like functional and OO programming (Scheme/Lisp and Smalltalk). This includes really understanding SQL (which I suddenly started to really like to my own surprise). Maybe I add some PostScript and TeX along the way. I also found a new appreciation for Perl's text processing capabilities and its influence from the 1990ies on.

Set aside that I constantly have to fight kind-of a "bad conscience" exactly BECAUSE I'm not hurrying along to try out the latest and greatest new fashion, I'm starting to feel a deep change in my programming skills, in my thinking about design and I'm constantly marveling where computing already has been and how much there is to learn from the classics. I also started to get a distinct feeling of "Man, I just don't NEED all this clutter and stuff" and a newly found appreciation of "simplicity" (Watch Rich Hickey's talk about "simple versus easy"..).

I started to slow down, to think more carefully, to read a lot more on concepts and ideas. I've finished recently Christopher Alexander's Pattern Language book for example to get a better feel for the "orginal" idea or read up on the history of "lean production" and Toyota's influence or looked again at Dieter Rams' design principles (I'm German and I basically grew up with Braun appliances, I didn't even realize how influential his designs have been to me..)

All this changed me and my thinking about programming deeply and made me find kind of a "central theme" or "essence" in programming and design I like and I'm starting to strive for.

In the long run, this also gives me a foundation of how I'm judging new tools, ideas, frameworks and programming languages.

On top of that, I'm better able to place myself into a certain "style" or "culture" of programming I'm not going to give upon as long as I can afford it.

Anyways - I personally think there actually is a choice whether one tries to catch up with everything new or peek into new things selectively or just steps back a little and watches how all this will unfold in the long run.

(I also have a long-held, un-proven personal theory that people simply like _writing_ frameworks a lot more than _using_ them - some are just faster to release theirs into the public.. :)