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Discussion on: How do you know when a technology is ready?

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Justin Mancinelli

I'm often reminded of Choose Boring Technology when I think about this.

That describes that it's not just a technology question but an org question.

If you are have a ton of people proficient with PHP and your legacy systems are PHP, it may cost more to rewrite than to make PHP work better (like Facebook creating HHVM).

If you have native Android and iOS teams of more than 5 people each and you apps have built up complexity over the years, but you are feeling the pain of duplicate efforts, incremental refactoring with Kotlin Multiplatform will be a better choice than choosing a solution outside the standard native mobile ecosystem (in terms of time, effort, reskilling, people leaving, hiring for the new technology).

Whether the tech itself is ready depends on your org's risk aversion, too. Is there a culture of early adoption, experimentation, moving fast and breaking things? That significantly increases the "ready" surface area. But a culture with higher risk aversion will wait until technology is "proven" by increased adoption of other orgs or just reassurance that paying a vendor will take care of the scaling, rollout, and customization issues that crop up.