Dependency churn and you

Way back when, I was working on a Java service. We used Spring and Hibernate, and we'd also started to use Postgres' new-fangled UUID types. Further, we'd integrated Lucene into our application, via Hibernate Search, to give our users full-text search capabilities. This seemed great, until Spring released their next major version and dropped support for the version we were using. Hibernate followed suit soon after. Then commenced what can only be described as one of the most frustrating upgrade experiences of my life. Spring was also moving away from XML config to @Autowired, which meant the docs were partially in XML, partially in the auto-wired style. Hibernate's own integration with Spring changed dramatically with the inclusion and prioritisation of JPA. At this small company, all 3 developers took a run at the challenge. All failed, burning months of time. This is a true story, but it's also something that stuck with me for years after. It has shaped my opinion of third-party…