Stop supporting old releases
I generally tow the line when it comes to software, but I do have a couple contrarian opinions and one of them is that LTS is really, really dumb. Not just for maintainers, for everyone.<p>LTS destroys your codebase. LTS allows mistakes like pushing state into your server that you didn&#x27;t know was there. LTS makes it <i>much</i> harder to upgrade because by the time you&#x27;re moving off of, say, Ubuntu 12.04 the whole world has changed. LTS multiplies the number of things that can go wrong. LTS makes people think that the OS is going to be around forever so they don&#x27;t architect their devices to be OS-updateable. IoT is bad now, but it&#x27;s slowly getting worse too because half these devices are stuck on some out of date version of linux running some out of date version of Python.<p>All my servers run Ubuntu 17.10. Rails is on the latest version. Ruby is on the latest version. I don&#x27;t pin any of my gems and every time I upgrade Ruby I upgrade the latest version of all the gems too.<p>This is only possible with extensive testing, and mistakes do get made here and there, but overall it&#x27;s much, much easier handling these issues one at a time. The only thing I don&#x27;t do is keep current on packages that I install via `apt` because I don&#x27;t want to risk building from source.