People have a tendency to come back to those things that they’re comfortable with. This is never more evident than in the realm of computer science, especially in web development. Everyone is an evangelist for some…thing they love using — for everything. There’s nothing wrong with that. Being excited about what we’re doing and the tools we’re using to do it is important in keeping ourselves interested and motivated in our work. This evangelism, however can stifle our growth as developers, and hold us short of our peak effectiveness.
As an avionics technician of 20 years for the US Air Force, I’ve spent a lot of time around all kinds of tools. Hand tools, power tools, ground and servicing equipment, test and calibration equipment and so on. It can seem daunting to someone on the outside the sheer breadth of tools I had at my disposal. If that wasn’t enough, many of those tools could be used for more than their intended purposes, with a lot of functional overlap. I was told by an early supervisor that it wasn’t as important to know how to use every one of them as it was knowing how to figure out which one to use. We had volumes of technical manuals to show us how something worked. He told me that everything in the tool room was nothing more than a tool, an idea I carried with me throughout my career. …
Many new developers have been met with what they assume to be a brash rebuke of their lack of knowledge. “Did you Google it?” It’s understandable that someone new to any field might feel like this advice is just an attempt to brush them — and their attempts to learn from experienced developers — off. And for the most part, that’s understandable. Coming to someone, or in many cases a group of experienced people and being told to do what seems so basic can frankly come off insulting. …
As a follow up to my previous story, Everything is Just a Tool, I wanted to address the litany of discussion around what to and not to use. Much of the work I do is in JavaScript, and it so happens that a greater portion of these articles are geared toward the language. And why wouldn’t they be? JavaScript isn’t just for the web on the front end. It has been described since its inception as the “language of the web”, but as time goes on, that becomes even less the case. Still, there are those who claim to represent the “best practices”, recommended by “top developers”. I believe there’s a better way to consider these concepts, and it begins with the same basic ideas I proposed previously. …
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