Riding Technology Wave
This week I have attended
Microsoft one day conference DevDays 2009 committed to fresh and soon to come
Microsoft development technologies. Excitement as one geek can be, I still was
annoyed by new technology rush, so I wanted to share some of my taught on that
subject.
Term explosion
When ever I hear about new
things I find my self in mental process of translating them in set of terms
that I understand. This probably is related to lack of IQ but it is mainly due
to term explosion. Every new thing that comes out has to have some cool name
although problem is widely known and defined few decades ago. Please, don’t do
this.
Technology and problems
Technology is here to solve problems, so to use it you first need to have a
problem for solving. If you don't have problems, new technology will bring them
to you. New technology needs to be learned and the God knows what errors it
has. Yes, I still have urge to use newest, fanciest tool, but can I justify it
to my manager? Best thing to do when you get existed about the new stuff is to
ask what are the technology faults, and rest assure it does have them.
Following are some of the question:
- Will it take too much time to learn
it?
- Will other developers except it and
learn it good enough?
- Are enough resources available?
- Are there any major issues?
- Will the product be supported over
next few years?
- What about performance?
- What are software and hardware
requirements for running it?
- Is the software mature and fast enough?
I will quote Facts
and Fallacies of Software Engineering:
-
Hype (about tools and technology)
is a plague on the house of software.
-
New tools and techniques cause an
initial loss of productivity / quality.
- COBOL is a very bad language, but all the others are so much worse.
(Read rest of the post on my blog...)