Comparison
Golden hammervsResume-driven development
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 →Resume-driven development
the new technology was chosen before the requirements were written, by the person who wanted to learn it.
Choosing technology for what it does for the chooser's career rather than for the problem. It is rarely conscious and almost never admitted, which is why it is best challenged obliquely: ask what the alternatives were and what specifically ruled them out. The organisational fix is the harder one — engineers need legitimate ways to learn new things, or they will find illegitimate ones and the company will operate them for a decade.
Full entry →