Posts tagged "Technology"

Attention Is the Only Non-Renewable Resource and We're Strip-Mining It

You can earn more money. You can rebuild your health. You can make new friends to replace the ones you lost. Most resources that feel scarce can be regenerated if you invest the effort. Attention cannot. You have a finite amount of attention in your lifetime. When you spend it, it is gone. There is no getting it back. There is no earning more. You get what you get and then you die.

Boring Technology Is a Competitive Advantage Disguised as Embarrassment

The most successful software I have ever built ran on technology that was embarrassing to admit at the time. PHP when everyone was doing Node. PostgreSQL when everyone was doing MongoDB. Server-rendered HTML when everyone was doing SPAs. Cron jobs when everyone was doing event-driven architecture. I was embarrassed about these choices at meetups. I felt like I had to apologise for not using the cool stuff. The other developers talked about their microservices and their Kubernetes clusters and I smiled and nodded and went home to my monolith that actually worked.