A Healthy Disdain for Technology

I'm convinced the reason so many successful projects use PHP, is not because of any inherent nature of the language. I think it's the people who use it. They just don't care. A successful project needs to be started by someone that cares just enough, but not too much.

If you're programming in PHP, you're not running around talking about "convention over configuration," giving talks, or trying to make your code beautiful. It's a garbage language, and you know it. But it allows you to get something up and running, so dang quick. You're failing while the other guy is still updating his gem file. You're advertising while the other guy is trying out some fancy new deploy script. You're incorporating feedback while the other guy is just starting to get to work. When he finally fails, he's used up half his runway, whereas you, the guy who didn't give a fuck about your code has gotten past that first failure, and are finally getting some traction.

Hopefully, the next guy to join the company will clean up your shit. The other guys code may not look like shit, but it doesn't solve any useful problems... so they never got the chance to hire that next guy.

-- swalsh (Hacker News commentor)

I like it when people use rough language toward technology.

Code kinda sucks, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t it be great if there were less of it? Isn’t it a pain in the ass to deal with?

Every new line of code you willingly bring into the world is code that has to be debugged, code that has to be read and understood, code that has to be supported. Every time you write new code, you should do so reluctantly, under duress, because you completely exhausted all your other options. Code is only our enemy because there are so many of us programmers writing so damn much of it.

-- Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror)

Like many in the software industry, I’m looking on through fingers over my eyes at the horrorshow of front-end web development in 2016.

-Look, it’s easy. Code everything in Typescript. All modules that use Fetch compile them to target ES6, transpile them with Babel on a stage-3 preset, and load them with SystemJS. If you don’t have Fetch, polyfill it, or use Bluebird, Request or Axios, and handle all your promises with await.

We have very different definitions of easy. So, with that ritual I finally fetched the data and now I can display it with React right?

-Is your application going to handle any state changes?

Err, I don’t think so. I just need to display the data.

-Oh, thank god. Otherwise I would had to explain you Flux, and implementations like Flummox, Alt, Fluxible. Although to be honest you should be using Redux.

…

I need to display data on a page, not perform Sub Zero’s original MK fatality.

-- Jose Aguinaga (“How It Feels to Learn JavaScript in 2016”)

Some times it feels like it’s not enough for teams to simply produce valuable software for their customers, they must do so while demonstrating “craftsmanship”, using the most lovingly-curated, artisanal stack of JavaScript frameworks, transpilers, chat tools, NoSQL databases, and text editors.

On the contrary, I believe we need technologists that have a healthy disdain for technology.

Be suspicious by default. Make every framework and tool fight its way in, justifying its existence at every step. Have the courage to say YAGNI to MEAN, blow a KISS to JSX.

And most importantly, get back to shipping great software to your customers.