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Beware of fruitless arguments

Tags
Belief
Description
Focus on what matters
Published
Published May 8, 2022
Here's a little secret: The people discussing what programming language is best are not shipping products. The people who don't care what programming language they're using are shipping products. They'll use whatever tool they need, whenever they need it. - Piete Levels
 
People working in software world like arguing about languages, scalability issues, constantly evolving patterns etc. There's nothing wrong with it, it's part of what makes up a professional career. But it's also not uncommon to see professionals got attached to those principles too much, many of whom have never seen any those issues in practice, besides being told “xyz” is good or bad.
 
Let's think about the goal of enterprise software and working backwards. Consistency isn't the goal. Writing maintainable software is cause it saves money for the business. Clean code isn't the goal. Good UX is cause it makes money for the business. More importantly, there’s this thing called good-enough software.
 
Don't confuse the goals with the means. If all we do is writing things in a consistent manner at cost of creating ad-hoc abstractions that no one can possibly understand, or a bit better, spending a ton of time understanding the tradeoffs of tools we are using to write good code but at cost of downgraded UX, we might be at risk of placing means over the goal.
 
Put it simple - don’t do just for sake of doing it.