Someone asked Chris Ferdinandi what his biggest challenge is as a web developer:

… the thing I struggle the most with right now is determining when something new is going to change the way our industry works for the better, and when it’s just a fad that will fade away in a year or three.

I try to avoid jumping from fad to fad, but I also don’t want to be that old guy who misses out on something that’s an important leap forward for us.

He goes on explain a situation where, as a young buck developer, he was very progressive and even turned down a job where they weren’t hip to responsive design. But now worries that might happen to him:

I’ll never forget that moment, though. Because it was obvious to me that there was an old guard of developers who didn’t get it and couldn’t see the big shift that was coming in our industry.

Now that I’m part of the older guard, and I’ve been doing this a while, I’m always afraid that will happen to me.

I feel that.

I try to lean as new-fancy-progressive as I can to kinda compensate for old-guard-syndrome. I have over a decade of experience building websites professionally, which isn’t going to evaporate (although some people feel otherwise). I’m hoping those things balance me out.

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