In one of Charity Majors' talks, I've seen yesterday, she mentioned, Dan McKinley's post Choose Boring Technology. I've found it and it is a real gem! Memorizing this post should be the final assignment for any programming course!
Why I think it is that important? It reminds us, engineers, what are out goals. I assure you we are not engineering for the sake of engineering. I've seen couple of times when instead of solving problems engineers were working on something just because it was new and cool.
The most striking example of "chasing shiny objects" I've seen was a proposal to remodel development process, that came from a totally fresh employee (and recent collage graduate). The guy did not have any idea why the current process was introduced, he had only a rough understanding how developers work, the only thing that mattered was that they were not using some trendy build system he happened to know. He was crushed by questions from senior engineers and they proved that his solution would take the development process 10 years back. Not only, he had not done his homework and had learnt how the current solution works, but more importantly he had not assessed the impact his changes would have had on the other's work.
Don't be this guy, read Dan's post and learn it by heart!
Top comments (0)