As I enter my 18th year of developing software, several recurring trends and forces have become obvious to me. My day job as a technical lead affords me time in the evening to write articles and prepare talks around these trends and forces, all of which interest me greatly. To date these talks include “The ROI of Refactoring”, “Nothing Matters More Than Coding Fast”, and most recently “Writing Custom DSLs” - which was a sneaky way to speak about these trends and forces in the form of technical talk.
Developers will often adopt a framework long before it is prudent, or will cling to a framework long after it has become irrelevant. This phenomenon of picking and sticking with a framework for all the wrong reasons affects everything we do, from the estimates we give, to the people we hire, and the companies we want to work for. Attempts to mitigate the risk of poor framework choices are often thwarted by the ability of a single developer to introduce a questionable framework that then gets adopted by their peers. The effect is magnified by the fact that many developers would rebel and quit if they could not use their framework of choice.
This talk will explore this phenomenon in an attempt to find it’s root causes. This meandering journey will take us down the dark paths of the recruiting industry’s keyword obsession, academia’s attempts to prepare graduates for the real world, as well as the natural human instinct to play with new and interesting things - regardless of the cost. Once we understand the nature of the problem, an attempt will be made to identify potential solutions, from those as uninspiring as training courses to as extreme as weekend hackathons.
