2013 Nose-Wrinklers

You know what I'm talking about. A colleague starts at a new gig and you meet up after a few weeks; "So how is it?"

And they wrinkle up their nose and say "awwww, it's alright. The people are good..."

You press a bit more, and it's the technology that is making them sad. And it turns out that while it was there in the job description, your colleague thought that it wasn't as important as the other stuff. Or it was glossed over in the interview. Yeah.

So I hereby present my 2013 Nose-Wrinklers -  If you see these technologies in a position description, consider carefully whether you want to be working with them in 2013:

• Struts - At the time, it was okay. That time has passed. The amount of boilerplate code and design compromises required to simply serve up some pages is unacceptable today
• CVS/SVN - I'm not saying that Git will solve everything. But it will get in the way a whole lot less than these antique attempts at version control
• Ant - Managing your own dependencies should take exactly one line of configuration. Specifying how to build your project's deliverable should take zero.
• IBM WebSphere - an application server for companies that feel like they need to pay money to someone for something you can get for free. Except the free offering is faster, more secure, more standards-compliant and more stable. Riiiight.
• "J2EE" - It's not J2EE, it's Java EE and has been for seven years. Whatever it's called, it's a very long way from the lightweight components most developers actually enjoy building.