Comparison
Golden hammervsInner-platform effect
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 →Inner-platform effect
the configuration grew conditionals and loops, and you realised you had written a programming language, badly.
Building a system so configurable that it reimplements the platform it runs on, only worse and without its tooling. The classic instances are a database inside a database — key-value tables with a type column — and a rules engine that grows control flow. The tell is that changing behaviour requires editing data rather than code, and that debugging it has no debugger.
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