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What was the most over-hyped software movement?

Ben Halpern on July 08, 2019

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lukewestby profile image
Luke Westby

Blockchain!!!!

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dfockler profile image
Dan Fockler

It's like almost no one really understood that you don't need blockchain if you have a trusted network, which most companies do. So they are basically implementing distributed databases which they probably are already using in some form once we ditched mainframes.

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stefandorresteijn profile image
Stefan Dorresteijn

Yeah, Blockchain is only useful when decentralization is of utmost importance. It's great for that though.

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mortoray profile image
edA‑qa mort‑ora‑y

Yet, tech like blockchain has amazing potential to reduce corruption and improve governance for countries and municipalities. It's too bad the hype is overshadowing this amazing ability.

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scottishross profile image
Ross Henderson

I've always wondered why governments don't use it in an online voting system. You could register your IP address up with something that identifies you in the gov database and use it for online voting.

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damian profile image
damian

Relevent xkcd

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jmfayard profile image
Jean-Michel 🕵🏻‍♂️ Fayard • Edited

That rings true, but also there is the simple fact that online voting solves a non-existing problem.

Paper based voting is much simpler and works.

If it doesn't work in the US, do it like in the countries where it works, problem solved.

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Massimo Artizzu

I don't know if I'm interpreting "movement" correctly, but I remember when NoSQL was super-hyped, then we realized that good ol' relational databases were still the best for most of the tasks.

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cubiclebuddha profile image
Cubicle Buddha

8 years of MongoDB development here and I can confidently say that I will never recommend NoSQL for another professional project.

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Thomas Junkツ

Nowadays, we are putting our JSON into relational databases :D
SCNR

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cubiclebuddha profile image
Cubicle Buddha • Edited

Oh I'm with you. If I ever need to save unstructured data, I would just use JSONB inside of PostGres. Now I'm a type-safety kind of guy, so I'm not sure I ever would do that. But if I found a good use case, PostGres' JSONB is the tech I would use instead of MongoDb.

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thomasjunkos profile image
Thomas Junkツ

If you tell nobody, I am using postgres too 😉

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n8chz profile image
Lorraine Lee

How is the name of that product supposed to be pronounced? Why is there only one S if it is both Postgres and SQL? FWIW I call it Post-GRE-SQL because somehow it seems "graduate level."

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rhymes

Originally the product was called "Postgres" (as Post Ingres, a DB at the time), then they joined the word SQL to make it clear it was a relational DB.

I think "POST-GRES-QL" is the correct one, like if it was "Postgres query language"

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Stefanos Kouroupis

After two years of using dynamodb I would gladly slap the team that came up with it. Especially the throttling mechanism

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rhymes profile image
rhymes

Is it bad?

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elasticrash profile image
Stefanos Kouroupis

Depends your traffic profile and pockets. If your traffic follows a nice and constant increase/decrease pattern it's fine. If you have huge sudden spikes like we do...the only option is to turn it to on demand charging ...which is slightly more expensive but you don't have all the problems that come with bursting capacity, throttling and scaling.

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

I wasted a lot of time fretting about databases at that point.

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Tom VanAntwerp

Blockchain: the world's least-efficient linked list!

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antonholmberg profile image
Anton Holmberg

These ones I would say:

  • IoT
  • Blockchain
  • Machine Learning

They all have the potential to be great but I fell like they are all really early in their development and a lot of people are just throwing it at problems where they really don't fit.

Also Scrum...

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kenbellows profile image
Ken Bellows

Blockchain, sure. Scrum... arguably, I guess, though I still use it. I disagree about IoT; afaik it's still huge, and more and more smart home devices are being produced every year and seem to be doing well (though I haven't done market research or anything).

But seriously, machine learning? The biggest, most successful field of AI research and development of the last like 50 years? I can't agree there. ML is powering every major search engine, it's used for photo and video analysis for all sorts of applications from social media to law enforcement and government intelligence, it's used for every sort of mass data analysis from advertising to stock markets to demographics research, and it's invaluable to the hard sciences where quickly identifying trends in huge datasets (think about trying to manually examine astronomical datasets, the output from Large Hadron Collider experiements, or even animal migration patterns with hundreds of thousands of data points).

I'm really not trying to be a jerk and go all "someone is wrong on the internet" or anything, I'm honestly very curious: what do you see as the failures of machine learning? Sure, there have been misfires and misapplications, just like any tech, but my god, it's been absolutely exploding as a field of both CS research and practical application for literally half a century

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Anton Holmberg

I might interpreting over-hyped in a different way than you are then. By over-hyped I don't really mean that something is bad. Machine Learning is awesome and has solved a lot of problems that were previously, dare i say, unsolvable.

What I mean with over-hyped is that it, in many ways, have started to be used as a buzzword. It is a thing that startups instantly put in their sales pitch even though they might use it in the smallest and least significant part of their actual service. Even worse is when ML is crammed in to a project that doesn't really warrant for it. Working for an agency I have even had clients saying "We want to solve this using machine learning" when there are solutions that would have done the work better.

This of course does not mean that machine learning is bad or has failed. It just means that it is hyped and sometimes misunderstood by a lot of people working in the industry.

What I am saying is not

"over-hyped = Bad"

but rather

"over-hyped = People sometimes use it only because there is hype around it".

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nektro profile image
Meghan (she/her)

Oh I totally agree with the first impretation though. I think Machine Learning is absolutely terrible. Even if we solve the issues around climate change, AI research will inevitable bring the end of humanity and needs to be stopped.

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kenbellows profile image
Ken Bellows

Do you mean because of strong AI and the rise of the machines, or privacy concerns, or something else? I probably agree with all of your concerns at least somewhat, but even if we avoid the research heading in those directions, ML is still fundamentally important. ML is a very field that covers everything from data compression algorithms to cyber security to, as I mentioned, interpretation of scientific datasets. We would honestly never have progressed past the tech of the 70s without ML

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Angela Whisnant

I thought scrum was an agile thing. Is it a software?

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antonholmberg profile image
Anton Holmberg

It's sort of a movement in, but not exclusive to, the software industry

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georgecoldham profile image
George

Also Scrum...

Scrum is one of them things that works amazingly... but only if done really well.

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Thomas Landin

Which means it's a terrible idea for a team organisation process.

You can't base your organisation on everyone performing the process to perfection all the time, you have to account for the fact that humans are performing it.

The best process is one that always produces the desired result regardless of the proficiency with which you execute it.

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antonholmberg profile image
Anton Holmberg

But do you think such a process exists? I feel that as soon as you add the human factor you also need to have a more human approach to team organization.

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cubiclebuddha profile image
Cubicle Buddha

That's why it's best to focus on the Agile values instead of the processes.

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antonholmberg profile image
Anton Holmberg

Agree. I just feel that management tend to just throw it in to a project as the silver bullet and then wonder why all of these sprint planning meeting haven't gotten us to write more code.

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Manda Putra

Yeah scrum, the management at scale 😂

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yaser profile image
Yaser Al-Najjar

React

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anpos231 profile image
anpos231

True, React is great but not THAT great.

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firozansari profile image
Firoz Ansari

SPA!

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Massimo Artizzu

IMO SPAs make a lot of sense. It's the concept of dealing with the view on the client side, rather than on the server. The server should just send data, not the view itself.
(Yes, all of this is nuanced by server-side rendering and so on, but still.)

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Martin Becker

The reason I like this mentality is it means you can build a single API that then gets used across everything, any updates or changes an everything gets access to it and it also means easier to maintain as well.

Combine that with a tool like React-Native and you have an almost build once run everywhere product.

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Jason Huebel

I actually agree strongly with this.

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Thomas Junkツ

Is it trolling, if I say OOP?

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drewknab profile image
Drew Knab

Nah, OOP deserves it.

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codemouse92 profile image
Jason C. McDonald • Edited

It's hard to pick just one! Candidates...

  • Neural networks,
  • Blockchain (@lukewestby called it first!),
  • Internet of Things,
  • AI/machine learning,
  • Scroll-wheel hijacking on Javascript websites...
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david_j_eddy profile image
David J Eddy

"...Scroll-wheel hijacking on Javascript websites..."

One of those things we should have asked 'just because we can, should we?'

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Jason C. McDonald • Edited

Apropos to the last twenty years of web development, I might add.

And people mock me for creating content-oriented sites without all the bells and whistles. "You should make it modern-looking."

criticism >> /dev/null

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Dan Fockler

I'd say that Neural Networks and AI/ML have made a huge impact in the large companies that have the expertise to implement them correctly, i.e. Google, Facebook, Amazon. But for the general purpose programmers they haven't at all.

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Michiel Hendriks • Edited

Cloud.
It's just the time-share computing from the 60s.

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jdsteinhauser profile image
Jason Steinhauser

The eternal mainframe...

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Casey Brooks

MongoDB. Also, Coffeescript.

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drewknab profile image
Drew Knab

Coffeescript gets a pass for being the transpile gateway drug.

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Lorraine Lee

What should a coffeescripter (like me?) graduate to? Clojure?

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cjbrooks12 profile image
Casey Brooks

What should a coffeescripter (like me?) graduate to?

Typescript, probably. Like CoffeeScript, Typescript is pretty much just normal Javascript, with some extra goodies. Clojure is a completely new paradigm of programming (Lisp), and won't be as easy of a transition.

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aritdeveloper profile image
Arit Developer

I second Coffeescript 🤦🏽‍♀️

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itsasine profile image
ItsASine (Kayla)

I liked Coffeescript :(

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val_baca profile image
Valentin Baca
  • Inheritance in OOP (Interfaces and Composition with Delegates are the better parts of OOP and yet we're still teaching the whole Dog extends Animal to newbies). The best OO code I've seen uses the least inheritance.

  • UML

  • XML

  • Thin Client vs Thick Client debate: mobile apps nuked this whole paradigm

  • Flash, ActionScript

  • AR/VR: believe me, I think it's cool but it's still just all hype for a fraction of a percent of the market (This is an area I hope I'm wrong in, but I wouldn't bet on AR/VR)

  • Domain Specific Languages: like, they're fine and useful, but 2010 hype was that they were going to Change the World

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rhymes

UML, that's a nightmare from the past :D
I remember Eclipse had a functionality that generated Java code from UML.

😅

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val_baca profile image
Valentin Baca

I recall the opposite, where coworkers would print out GIANT UML diagrams of our code for new hires and interns. Looking back it was probably just a weird flex.

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david_j_eddy profile image
David J Eddy

DSL's...uggg. I have yet to see a situation that would not be better served using an established language/markup.

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anpos231

UML is actually very useful to visualize existing code.
But it must be done properly.

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mshel profile image
MikhailShel

I'd say microservices. You go anywhere and they'll tell you "we are splitting our monolith into microservices"... A lot of the times it ending up a bunch of smaller monoliths.

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Martin Bean

That was going to be my suggestion too 😄

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katafrakt profile image
Paweł Świątkowski

Bunch of smaller monoliths is still far better (usually) than one huge monolith. At least you need to set some boundaries.

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mshel profile image
MikhailShel • Edited

if its the same team building them as the original one it will end up been a bunch of huge monoliths(arrgh here we go again) that slow everything down and eventually team will come back to refactoring the original monolith. its very sad:)

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Jason Huebel

Most people are saying "blockchain", but I would point specifically to "cryptocurrency". It is essentially a software movement. But bitcoin and its ilk has ZERO intrinsic value. And its monetary value is based on the whims of a market that buys and sells almost nothing except speculation on it's own currency. I realize there are a few "major retailers" that accept bitcoin now, but it's an afterthought in most cases.

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Austin S. Hemmelgarn

Most 'real world' currency also has zero intrinsic value. Most major currencies throughout the world only have value because the governments responsible for them say they do and most of the world population for whom it matters either agrees or just blindly trusts them.

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Luke Westby

Sovereign currencies have value because issuing governments only accept tax payment with those currencies, and tax payment is required under penalty of prison. I’m not sure I would call that agreement or blind trust.

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anpos231 profile image
anpos231

It's the governments way of ensuring that currency has value.

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jhuebel profile image
Jason Huebel • Edited

That's certainly true. But with cryptocurrency, you don't even have the advantage of physical currency.

I think it's fair to say that based on the amount of Bitcoin that's been stolen or extorted from individuals-- including by Bitcoin exchange operators your supposed to be able to trust-- only a fool puts any real confidence in cryptocurrencies.

So where does that put us? Only government-regulated cryptocurrency could be trusted in any realistic way. And that basically defeats one of the goals of cryptocurrency.

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Kasey Speakman

Not to mention the gluttonous waste of energy it takes to "mine" cryptocurrency.

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gene profile image
Gene

BLOCKCHAIN!

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Thierry • Edited

Docker 🍿

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biros profile image
Boris Jamot ✊ /

Docker rules the world, bro !

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mandaputtra profile image
Manda Putra

I agree so many people miss understand it 😂

They miss understand microservice
They miss understand kubernetess

So many miss understanding on this field

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rhymes profile image
rhymes

"Write once, run anywhere" for Java
XML as the universal interchange format (we're still dealing with CSV :D)

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val_baca profile image
Valentin Baca

+1 for XML. JSON ate it for breakfast.

But I don't understand: Java fulfilled that promise? Java has been the Top or 2nd Top Language for 15 years1

On top of that, the JVM allows programmers to target the JVM instead of worrying about Operating Systems.

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rhymes profile image
rhymes • Edited

"Write once, run anywhere" wasn't about popularity, it was about writing the code once and running it literally anywhere.

They created JVMs for basically anything (from personal computers to washing machines), but there was obviously a fault in that logic: virtual machines don't completely isolate you from the operating system.

Also remember not all JVM implementations were the same (I'm not sure about the current state).

See also what happened on the client side with Java applets or well... do you remember Java Mobile Edition?

That's why that slogan was "over promising and under delivering" :)

Java and JVM as you said reached immense popularity, but the title of the thread is about "over hyped software movement" and I think this one deserves to be here.

I wonder if WebAssembly will be the "write once, run anywhere" promise fulfilled of the 2020s or if in a few years it will be mentioned in another thread like this :D

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ahferroin7 profile image
Austin S. Hemmelgarn

On top of that, the JVM allows programmers to target the JVM instead of worrying about Operating Systems.

Only if you're doing relatively simple stuff and don't need amazing performance. The VFS layer in particular still shows a lot of the underlying OS behaviors.

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JOHN

That's why Docker was created, we do not need Java anymore

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jhuebel profile image
Jason Huebel • Edited

I'll take "Over-hyped Technologies From The 1990's" for $100, Alex. ;-)

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George

During my AI module at uni a while back, my lecturer (a leading AI researcher) basically said that the huge wave in AI/ML success is basically running AI/ML theories from the AI boom in the 60's and 70's. Now we have the easy access to data and processing power to actually get somewhere with it.

New approaches to AI/ML are rare and tools like TensorFlow basically slow actual innovation.

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DrBearhands

Can confirm.

AFAIK the new stuff is 'just' practical stuff about what structures work better for tasks, and way too expensive for most companies.

Most of the industry still neglects data bias, one of the first things I learned about AI, with urban legends about soviet tanks and sunshine going back to the early days of AI...

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joelnet profile image
JavaScript Joel

Whatever software I'm currently using at the moment.

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rhymes profile image
rhymes

pragmatist :D

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jc profile image
JC

The chat bot craze from about 3-4 years ago

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Brian Rinaldi • Edited

I think it is too early to judge things like Blockchain, IoT and machine learning. I think all 3 could still have huge impacts, just not in the way we initially thought they might.

If you want a proven hype vs actual, how about the rise of "rich internet applications" a decade or so ago. MS had Silverlight, Adobe had Flex, then there was JavaFX and a ton of other lesser known competitors. It was going to be the wave of the future and companies sunk millions of dollars into these applications and they disappeared almost overnight (mostly due to the rise of mobile and the iPhone especially and their inability to run on them).

Or how about hybrid mobile development? This is far from dead like rich internet apps are, but there was a time when companies like Garter and others predicted native development would fade in favor of hybrid apps. I think I remember quotes that they expected something like 80% of mobile development would be hybrid using something like PhoneGap. Companies bet big on hybrid tools around cloud builds and deployment. There still a place for hybrid apps and tools like Ionic are still hugely popular, but hybrid never quite dominated anywhere near the way it was predicted.

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anpos231

jQuery has been there for 13 years and it's still being used today (although a lot of people have moved away)
React has been there for 6 years but only recently started to gain the hype.
Knockout has been there for quiet a while (9 years).

I'd say that good JS frameworks can easily live 10 years. But there is constantly a lot of hype regarding new frameworks because of how easy it is to create a new one. It's like somebody is constantly making and releasing new frameworks.

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Jaaki

It looks like every single movement has been mentioned!!! hahaha

Yes, we live in a world that values hype over proof.

The social media effect will have us all jumping in the fire if it's the "IN" thing to do.

When young developers are wise enough to know that their new toy is just hype, they are probably too old to still get hired :D

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Sinuhe Jaime Valencia • Edited

Two that people still use to sell projects but aren't as shinny as the hype made them look:

  • Big Data
  • Agile

Without starting a rant —there's a lot of articles taking both sides— over agile, is one really over-turbo-hyped things.

And the case for big Data is that everyone started saying "we have a big data solution" and eventually all the big data solutions turned out to be simply dashboards reading simple databases, most of them with simple query generators

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n8chz profile image
Lorraine Lee

What is the difference between "big data" and "data mining"? Or is it just the same thing rebranded?

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drbearhands profile image
DrBearhands

Big data is about handling lots of data, it's about volume. Data mining is about finding data, it's about source.

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kyleboe profile image
Kyle Boe

The network that Walmart chose to go with is capable of 1 million transactions per second. It may not be as fast a writing to a DB but the tradeoff of trust is worth it IMO.

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conradj profile image
Conrad Jackson 🇬🇧🇹🇭
  • Y2K!
  • VR (the first time)
  • The first 10 years of “the Cloud” caused a lot of devs to 🙄 but we’ve all come round to it now (see also serverless).
  • TDD/FP/Software craftmanship seemed to have some great ideas before being crushed by relentless gatekeeping.
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mandaputtra profile image
Manda Putra

Microcersives / Docker! So many poeple wrong about it.

I remember when some people consider that having 9 different docker in one app is a microservice.

There are no microservice without, gateway, separate database/service, so many people wrong and miss understand it.

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steelwolf180 profile image
Max Ong Zong Bao

Fintech I had spoken to a few people who were previously working in banks.

I can't imagine how anyone can stay there using old tech that doesn't allow you to grow as a developer with tech as old as 20 - 30 years old.

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Andrew Brown 🇨🇦 • Edited

For web-dev it was Meteor. It was supposed to be the next Ruby on Rails.
Meteor was very productive however not having a Postgres Adaptor and only MongoDB I think hurt its adoption significantly.

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drewtownchi profile image
Drew Town

I definitely agree with all of the blockchain comments. I think Big data/Hadoop was way over-hyped. Way too many people without big data trying to get in on the "big" data game.

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jmfayard profile image
Jean-Michel 🕵🏻‍♂️ Fayard

Yet, tech like blockchain has amazing potential to reduce corruption and improve governance for countries and municipalities

Hard sell to me.

Corruption is not a technlogical issue but a deeply ingrained social/cultural/economical/cultural/political problem.

so trying to "fix it with Blockchain" looks to me like an hammer who thinks that everwthing looks like a nail.

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josemunoz profile image
José Muñoz

Microfrontends!

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brentsoles profile image
Brent Soles

Agreee! There are some inefficiencies(bundle sizes can be huge) and wonky solutions to get reactivity right for an application. Thoughts?

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fuksito profile image
Vitaliy Yanchuk

Vue.js

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cutiko profile image
Erick Navarro

I like Vue more than React, both are good, but JSX it doesnt feel natural

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joshkisb profile image
Joshua Kisb

Vue is awesome

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highcenburg profile image
Vicente G. Reyes

BLOCKCHAIN!

 
stefandorresteijn profile image
Stefan Dorresteijn

Yeah, with the Lightning Network that scales up a bit more, but core Bitcoin is hard to scale

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lampewebdev profile image
Michael "lampe" Lazarski

Agile!

or how we are doing agile today to be more precise

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scottishross profile image
Ross Henderson

Then surely you mean "agile". As most companies are "agile" but aren't agile :)

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lampewebdev profile image
Michael "lampe" Lazarski

Yeah from today we will do "agile". Next day everything is the same :)

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Sloan, the sloth mascot
Comment deleted
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georgecoldham profile image
George

Can you expand? I feel like it's one of the greatest successes in the last decade of development.

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drewknab profile image
Drew Knab

I think it depends on how much you like HG and SVN.

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adam_cyclones profile image
Adam Crockett 🌀

Google face screen, I mean glass.

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katafrakt profile image
Paweł Świątkowski

JavaScript on backend

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Laurie

Can I say typescript? I’ve used it before, and know many people who do, but it hasn’t taken off in nearly the ways people expected. JavaScript is still far in a way dominant.

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alanmbarr profile image
Alan Barr

BDD (Behavior Driven Design testing specifications). Product owners do not have time to write specs or do coding. If someone likes it great but otherwise there isn't amazing benefits people get.

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ash_coolman profile image
Coolman
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saikumar profile image
Sai Kumar

Angular Ivy renderer

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brentsoles profile image
Brent Soles

Definately want to throw micro-frontends on here. Reason being is they introduce more engineering challenges than they help solve them and can tank performance/usability of web apps.

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cfernandomaciel profile image
C.Fernando Maciel

Not exactly a software movement, but here it goes: agile.

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cutiko profile image
Erick Navarro

Phonegap

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anwar_nairi profile image
Anwar • Edited

NoSQL, always had the feeling it never broke through like it should have.

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brihaspati profile image
Brihaspati Bharani

Front end frameworks! Angular, React, Vue. All of them work pretty same except few differences here and there. Still there's lot of hype around those and it's way too much I would say.

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khrome83 profile image
Zane Milakovic

Dart.

They even tried to make dart run native in a browser. This was google typing to reinvent the early "Works in IE" days.

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_hs_ profile image
HS

can't decide between FP, microservices, blockchain, cloud, graphql... :D

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DrBearhands

The fact that nobody mentioned second life (as a legitimate mainstream market place) makes me feel old.