We all try to choose the best tools for the job, but occasionally we may fall short. When did you choose unwisely? What have you learned in retrospect?
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We all try to choose the best tools for the job, but occasionally we may fall short. When did you choose unwisely? What have you learned in retrospect?
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
Latest comments (27)
Not choosing NX for a monorepo, while instead spending weeks trying to bootstrap my project with internal libraries using yarn workspaces… glad I found NX shortly thereafter.
Choosing angular over svelte.
This might be controversial, but for me it has to be using React for a little project at work a few years back. I had recently started learning react and thought to use it at work, even though we hand't used it before and the project was really small and simple.
In retrospect I should've used something simpler, for example Svelte or even just plain html/js instead. Adding react made the project quite a bit more complex than it should've been. As the project is small we don't work on it often so whenever I work on it I have to refresh on react and it takes a bit of time to get stuff done.
AG Grid in React
In hindsight, I regret choosing redux-observables, because a) redux requires more boilerplate than is good for your sanity and b) rx.js makes it simple to handle complexity and thus can trick you into adding unnecessary complexity to your code.
I chose to start a new admin panel app as a sister application to the public web app and went with Quasar V2, Vue 3, Vuex v4 with modules and Typescript.
Just too much cognitive load and poor documentation around getting Vuex4 to validate Typescript property with the module loader.
Pinia is official state-manager for vue 3 now😁
Yup!
:)
Like some others, I chose to use Mongo once and later realized I probably should have gone with an RDBMS. But it's a minor regret, because using Mongo mostly went okay.
Another time, I was creating a project and using MySQL. This was for an internal tool, where uptime wasn't necessarily critical, but data integrity and safety was. I wanted to use Amazon RDS because I felt confident in their replication and backup capabilities. But the IT guys insisted that we use the company's own data center and OS volume snapshotting for backups. I objected a bit, but ultimately threw my hands up and said "okay whatever".
Shortly after I left the company, I got called up because the disk failed and the backups weren't restoring and they were in complete panic. Fortunately they were able to fix a backup image and recover from it, and then they migrated to RDS. So it wasn't really my decision but it stands out to me as a time when I should have stood my ground more firmly on a tech decision.
I can't think of any tech that I've used in a project that I've regretted.
I have had projects where the tech we're using probably would have been better off if we had selected a different tech (e.g., if we had chosen F# instead of C#, or if we had chosen D instead of C++). But by the time those sour grapes came to light, it was not practical to switch languages midway through the project — and maybe it would have turned out to be be worse.
As I like to say, "If we switch from Windows to Macintosh, we wouldn't have all these problems. We'd have all new problems."
People are gonna hate for this:
I chose react. For building a simple 4 page website. Worst mistake ever , it was super overcomplicated. Maybe I did something wrong? 🤷
I usually don't regret the piece of tech, I typically regret either the implementation, poor requirements gathering, or lack of foresight in understanding how that particular stack component evolved over time.
But onto the list: