I’ve been in this industry for over a decade now, and the one thing I’ve learnt is that you should never believe the hype.

Technologies come and go, things get superceded, things improve. You just need to look at the technologies or frameworks that are no longer with us, such as Flash and those that are now barely used including the myriad of JS solutions we’ve used. Sure, sometimes you might want to ride the wave, it’ll be fun, but you might not be left with much afterwards.

Using what is cemented into the ecosystem and battle tested will mean you don’t come across any horrible surprises. You have a myriad of documentation and stack overflow questions answered on the most superfluous of issues. Getting things done is easy, if not always elegant.

Selling you the dream.

Twitter, blog posts and conferences will sell you a reality that in most cases doesn’t exist in the corporate world. That’s the purpose of those mediums, they are trying to build and audience, create a market, get you interested in what is new. It’s basic marketing.

Mircroservices, Macrofrontends, Unit tests, Static code analysis, Best practices, Containers, K8s, Serverless, Cloud, ai, big data, react, go, nosql, sass, PWAs, design systems, automation, agile.

All these things are useful and important in the right circumstances, however if you think your company should be following all of these methodologies then you’re being naive. Businesses have objectives and stakeholders to appease. They’re not here for us to create the mecca of the technology world. Sure, some big businesses can afford to live the dream, but those are far and few between.

K.I.S.S.

There is nothing wrong with a well organised and structured monolith. In fact for most of us, that’s still the best way to go.

All these things have been heralded as the holy grail and yet most businesses are using at most a couple of these idioms.

Our new devs are lambasted with complicated tech stacks, overpriced hosting solutions and preachy beliefs that make all but the most simple hello world application a difficult and unsatisfying proposition.

The Fundamental Fallacy

Rather than looking at problems, we memorize frameworks, syntax and convoluted ways to complete simple tasks.

I’m sick of telling people that you can achieve things in a few lines of JavaScript. There is no need for a complex SPA application written in React/Angular/Vue installing 37 dependencies to make an http request, or fill a simple form.

I’m tired of reading countless blog posts on how to use Gatsby and React to create the most perfect blog site that you can host on Netlify or GitHub pages. If you want to blog, create some content, don’t spend 3 months creating a damn blog framework, there are hundreds out there already! Just use one!

The internet and technology has been around for a long time, and people are always pining for what’s new. It’s understandable, it’s new, it’s shiny, it’s cool. But it’s not always necessary. Actually it’s very rarely necessary.

Sometimes a few lines of JQuery can do everything you need. Sometimes you don’t need 100% code coverage across your codebase. Sometimes you just use WordPress to deploy your blog, and focus on the content you are trying to share.

Sometimes you shouldn’t believe the hype.