257mWhat are your programming hot takes?
If programmers stick to what they know and not try to solve every problem at hand with the latest thing/programming language they’ve learned then there would be fewer bugs and projects would end by the estimated dates.
bob_wileyThis would also create significantly less technical debt.
…but it can be nice to dabble.
I’m a Ruby developer but recently needed to solve a problem from within a non-Ruby Kubernetes container.
If I stuck with what I know I would’ve had to include the entire Ruby runtime into a totally unrelated application’s image.
Knowing exactly how to solve the problem in Ruby but not wanting to add hundreds of Ruby scripts everywhere, I found Crystal was the perfect fit for my needs.
I was able to write a slim sidecar container. The Dockerfile compiles it into a static binary, trashes the entire toolchain (FROM build) and the resulting image is just a few megabytes.
I think failed estimated dates just highlight how much we don’t know about ourselves, our systems and our own knowledge.
It is the abyss of the unknown talking back to us. We have the privilege of having the stuff we don’t know thrown back at us to prove us wrong. And we often fail to be humbled by it.
Much of the job is dealing with the unknown. A surprise in scheduling can either shorten a task or lengthen it. It can’t be shortened past the time it takes to recognize it’s finished, but it can be lengthened indefinitely.