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Marek Kirejczyk
Ethereum blockchain Engineer. Ethworks, Universal Login, Ambrosus.

Hype Driven Development — part 2: The Phenomenon

My last post “Hype Driven Development” (read here) was surprisingly well received with 54K reads and 2K+ recommends. Thank you for your interest! It seems that I was able to diagnose and name the phenomenon that is recognised by many other programmers, but till now didn't have a popular name.

Take a look at some of the best comments and discussions around this post.

Hyping the Hype

The post went viral on twitter, reddit and slashdot. Here are some of the highlights:

Horror stories

Two hilarious horror stories were shared on slashdot:

Been there, done that by Zarjazz

“Several years ago my Pointy-haired Boss was reading technology articles (bad idea) and caught the “Big Data” bug. It spread to our CTO, CIO and all department heads like wildfire. This led to our Development team being turned into NoSQL zombies who said words like “Hadoop”, “Shark”, “Spark” in response to any new product requirement. It was a glorious vision of a magical backend system that would take all our data from every platform, that would scale up and out forever, and could be asked any question and give us exactly the results we wanted all instantly. The fact no one in the entire company had ever used any of the technology before or the fact we didn’t even have any Java experience to setup even the base Hadoop installation were just minor points not worth discussing. I would like to say I was the lone dissenting voice, well I was and said lets just stick to SQL, but even I got caught up in the hype eventually.
18 months later and a sickening amount of man-years wasted and contractor money spent with no usable products or services the conclusion was NoSQL isn’t a good fit for our data or platform use case. So they all went back to standard MySQL and completed 90% of the delayed projects in under 4 weeks.
On the plus side management heads did roll. I have a new My Pointy-haired Boss and CTO. However they have now started to drop in the words “Microservices” and “Docker” into all discussions. I can see a new hype-train arriving shortly …”

Avoid the silver bullet that is Sencha ExtJS by EmperorOfCanada

“Wow, ExtJS brought all development to a complete multi year halt. In the first few months ExtJS development is way way way faster than any other framework out there. But after about 6 months all you are doing is fighting with the framework. Just an endless knifefight. Any single problem could be solved against the base instlall of ExtJS but what happens is that you have to develop workaround after workaround to make the system snap into place for any given need. Those workarounds then make future “easy” changes impossibly hard.
So you might have something as simple as wanting to put the focus on a login username. If you had just done the page as your first round and thought of that then, like everything with ExtJS, a little weird but fairly easy. If you already have fought with sencha to make other things happen on the login page (say a filtered twitter feed) then ExtJS is probably broken 8 ways from sunday and you can’t set a focus worth a damn.
Save yourself a world of pain and just use basic javascript combined with either simple single function libraries, or worst case scenario use a framework that won’t blow up your company like react or polymer. Yes, you won’t be a showoff in the first few weeks of development like you could with ExtJS, but you won’t blow up your company when you can’t finish the project until you realize that it can only be done by throwing out ExtJS.And if you get 5 or 6 people in the company who get training by ExtJS, good luck cutting through her bullshit about how ExtJS is the best thing ever even though the project is now 18 months late.”

Best tweets

Many people recognised the problem and replied in tweets:

Some learned they are not alone..

… and others confessed to be HDD practitioners:

Two new books were proposed:

And as my favorite comment, someone pasted the following comic:

There was many more great comments and tweets. I tried to cherry-pick the best ones, but I’m sure there’s much more that I missed in the flood of notifications and comments.

Happy hyping!

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