Knowing Versus Doing

Over-engineering is ripe in the software industry; this mainly manifests in three ways:
1. Needlessly complicated design.
2. Lift and shift engineering – Picking up technology and practices from other places without understanding the context in which it was developed.
3. Being trendy – Using frameworks and languages that are currently in fashion irrespective of whether one needs it or not.

I have written about this before.

Please do not take this prose as an argument for being sloppy and building crappy products.

I firmly believe one of the reasons why this occurs is that people confuse knowing with doing. You being aware of something should not force you into using or implementing it. You might have a personal inclination towards a language or a framework; you might even believe that it is the best in the world, but that does not imply you rewrite your currently well-working production application in the said technology. You come across something new, and shiny does not mean it has to be part of your application stack.

When we see something novel and trendy, our brain actively tries to figure out ways in which we can make it a part of our lives.

Another arena where this plays out is in doing things if and when needed. Because you read a blog post touting Redis as the next best thing to sliced bread should not make you go about slapping Redis as a cache in front of your data stores. Your data size might be tiny that it entirely fits into main memory. Achieving five nines of reliability is a daunting task which takes a lot of engineering and effort. As a geek, it is a fascinating problem to work on, but your application may not need it. Just because you are aware of what others are doing to achieve this does not imply you too embark on this path.

If you ponder over this, you will realize this behavior is not only restricted to work but plays out in our personal lives too. When we come across something new and exciting in any domain of life, we try to adopt it irrespective of whether we truly need it or not, and when we do it, we go way out of line in justifying its usefulness to ourselves.