Maximum overkill. Words that perfectly describe the lust the technology industry has for emulating everything tech behemoths like Google, Facebook, and Amazon do.
Pragmatic solutions seem to have gone out the door. If you’re building a line-of-business app, you probably don’t need the same tech that runs Amazon’s shopfront. Trying to emulate it could drastically increase the complexity of your codebase, increase costs, and create problems that you wouldn’t have with a more straightforward solution. There’s no shame in keeping things simple.
This excellent article from 2017 is even more applicable today.
So many companies blindly pursue the hottest new technologies without having a deep understanding of why these technologies exist or which problem they aim to solve.
This urge to add another line to a tech lead’s resumé or the company’s pitch deck often outweighs the business value of using a new technology.
I remember a few years ago when masses of people were supposedly using MongoDB, and people were doing talks about it and singing its praises; this was at a time where I had a very good use case for it.
After many lonely late nights troubleshooting issues on a project I was implementing, I realized that a lot of the hype was cargo-cultism, and people lacked a deep understanding of the unique problems that MongoDB causes while solving others.
I still have a lot of love for MongoDB in the right scenario, and the aggregate framework is a beautifully elegant piece of software - but it isn’t for every team or every project. Horses for courses.
We need a sanity check.
I’m not proposing that we go back to Visual Basic 6! Not at all. What I’d like to see is that we have fewer new frameworks coming out and that we have more quality and depth of knowledge in the ones we have.
Let the tech giants and infinitely funded start-ups use things like DynamoDB, Kafka, and unnecessary cloud functions. If you need those things and they benefit you, use them to your heart’s content - but please - stop shaming companies who choose to use less flashy technologies for the sake of sanity and pragmatism.
A shiny new Italian sports car is a lot of fun, but keeping one running costs a lot of money and they’re notoriously temperamental. For a fraction of the price, you could drive a brand new Toyota instead. It might not do 0-60 in 3 seconds, but it’ll get you where you need to be safely and without catching fire, and in the long run, you’ll have much fewer maintenance headaches.
No amount of new technology can compensate for poor design decisions.
