There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something
that should not be done at all
— Peter Drucker
Despite what the godfather of management says, what the engineers want to talk
about is:
Programming languages
AI
Cloud providers
UI Libraries
APIs
DevOps
Architecture patterns
Databases
What the customer doesn’t care about: (see above).
The things in the list don’t even matter! They’re fungible. Given three
mainstream choices for programming language, AI, cloud, etc., literally any
combination of them is sufficient.
(noun) When the costs of reverting to a previous
state or switching to a different path become prohibitively high, even in the
face of better solutions.
The company’s reliance on Progress 4GL illustrates path dependence—despite
newer technologies being available, decades of ABL development make switching
platforms economically unfeasible.
(noun) A principle that states one should not remove or change something (like
a fence, rule, or tradition) until they understand why it was put there in the
first place.
Before the team decided to remove the legacy authentication system, they
invoked Chesterton’s fence and spent time understanding why it was originally
implemented that way.
