Comparison
Cargo cultvsGolden hammer
Cargo cult
the team adopted the whole process from a conference talk without the constraints that made it work there.
Copying the visible practices of a successful team without the conditions that made those practices effective. It shows up as microservices at ten engineers, a review process from a company of thousands, or a testing pyramid nobody can explain. The diagnostic question is why this works here, and a copied answer that cannot survive it is ritual rather than engineering.
Full entry →Golden hammer
the answer was Kafka again, and the problem this time was a nightly report over four thousand rows.
Reaching for the tool you know rather than the tool that fits, because familiarity is doing the choosing. Everyone does it, and the tell is that the technology is picked before the requirements are stated. It is worth naming carefully in a review, because the counter-argument is often legitimate — a team that operates one technology well may genuinely be better off with an imperfect fit than with an unfamiliar tool nobody can debug at 3am.
Full entry →