Despite having figured this out on my own, the news hit me pretty hard: UWP is basically the second-generation version of the Metro app platform that debuted with Windows 8 in 2012, but it has its roots in the Windows Phone app platform, also called Metro, which had debuted two years earlier. Had Microsoft really just wasted the previous decade? My head was spinning.

But as I know all too well, Microsoft has bounced from developer framework to developer framework over the years, responding to both industry and software development trends each time. This is something I’ve thought about a lot. And I’d likewise been thinking about a series of articles about these topics, too. I just wasn’t sure whether this would resonate with readers. Non-programmers, I felt, would find this topic a bit too dense. And actual developers would likely mock my surface-level understanding of their careers. And so I waffled.