I saw the movie Everest the other day. I generally will watch or read anything about people climbing Everest. It's one of my things. I don't even know where it came from.

(Spoiler alert. Skip this paragraph if you haven't seen the movie and care about it beling spoiled.) It's about a famous ill-fated 1998 climb. One of the main characters, a real person, should not have gone to the summit on the day he went. There was a point where he could have gone down but he went up. That was the moment of truth. If he had gone down he probably would have lived. Instead he died.

I got to that point in this little day project. It's a project that would have been manageable in one day in Frontier, but in Node, forget it. I have to pull the code out of the big app and work on it on the side, then I can test each new thing I put in, and get it to work.

I would have had to back out of this, either way -- pretty sure of that. So I backed out before I spent two days doing the code, and another two realizing it would never work.

It's a shame I had to walk away from Frontier as my runtime. So much learning was packed into that codebase. Now I start at a much more primitive base. It's got its own rewards, the code runs so much faster, and scales. That's because Frontier never got the investment that JS got. But it does so much more and a much higher level.