If you have been working on a product for too long as part of a small startup, maintaining the software means that you are not keeping up with the latest frameworks and tools that are making their way into the tech space.

When working on Brightpod, we chose a then-popular PHP framework and stuck to using jQuery for the javascript needs. A few years down the line, the whole industry was no longer talking about CodeIgniter and jQuery. Laravel and React / Vue were popular tools of choice.

Being a small startup meant that most of your time was spent working on new features and keeping up with the customers' bugs. Rewriting software was never on the schedule. I did not see the point in rewriting the software. We found it easy to add new features and scale the software to meet customer needs.

If you work with a design agency or as part of a multinational, the choice to learn a new framework or new set of tools presents itself as part of the next project. In a small startup, though, you need to pick your battles between meeting customer demand vs focus on learning new tech. Internally, we did speak about rewriting the javascript framework and making use of the new framework. Something else always took priority, though.

Looking back, I wish we had taken the chance and learnt new tools along the way. Now that I know a lot about these tools, I can see how they can help make software development easier.