Advice to my younger self: become allergic to the churn

Advice to my younger self: become allergic to the churn
lambdaisland.com

Another way to spot "The Churn": When you're done, what new value did your effort create or unlock? Are users better off? Is the system more resilient and reliable? Or did you just get it back to the way it was working before everything went sideways?

Find more ways to create and unlock value and you'll find you move forward much faster.

Maybe what's important is not making people belive that yesterday's technology is obsolete and should be burried or abandoned. The shiny new thing is just an other tool in the toolbox and it's not because I created a new shape of screw that all the other screws are worthless. There is still plenty of screws all over the world that need to be unscrewed, we need those tools to do that, people to know how to work with them and some of these screws still need to be made. Maybe people don't talk about these screws as much ? They don't make the news anymore because they've been there for so long ?

Maybe the point here is that social media thrives on the shiny new thing, it's the core concept of it. An old news paper is worthless, no one ever sold an older news paper. So they need to grab some attention to live and the shiny new thing is a way to accomplish that.

But it's not because there is lots of articles about all those new frameworks that the older ones are worthless. We need both. Maybe for some projects we will not choose an architecture based on 10 years old concepts and frameworks and some other projects need stability and a whole tested and stable toolchain and documentation for the years to come.

What kind of work do you want to accomplish ? Small projects where you work alone ? Where you just serve a few people ? Or big projects with a huge infrastructure that needs to deliver to millions with great economic impact ?

I bet you don't use a hammer only when you want to build kitchen furniture. And then tools that are needed in a factory that build kitchen furniture are not the same that the ones that needs to be used for home. They need a whole supply toolchain, some testing & quality checking. Whereas the worksman in his own workshop is going to have less tools ...

We need all kinds of software and technology, maybe what's hard is to be able to identify the right ones and defining precisely what we want and where we think we will go. People are always going to want to try to use the shiny new thing. We all need novelty, enhancing the shortcommings of your current tools.

At the same time, finding something that works and sticking with it perpetually sounds wonderful - perfect, even. But breaking things and doing hard things also leads to innovation and new ideas.

So ultimately I think there needs to be a balance and everyone should embrace a little churn while eschewing it in the broad form.