How to Make Technology Choices

Truly awesome post by Steven Lott.

The expectation of finality is the most disturbing: the expectation that someone can make OnePerfectFinalDecision.

No technology choice is ever final. Today’s greatest ever state-of-the-art, kick-ass-and-take-names SDK may evaporate in a cloud of lawsuits tomorrow. Today’s tech giant may collapse. Today’s platform of choice may be tomorrows weird anachronism.

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If you are really, really lucky, you may get big enough to have scalability issues. Having a scalability issue is something we all dream about. Until you actually have a specific scalability issue, don’t try to “pre-solve” a potential problem you don’t yet have. If your software is even moderately well design, adding architectural layers to increase parallelism is not as painful as supporting obscure edge cases in user stories.

When you’re still circulating your ideas prior to writing a demo, all technology choices are equally good. And equally bad. It’s more important to get started than it is to make some impossibly PerfectFinalDecision. Hence the advice to build early and build often.

Making a tech choice and migrating after you know more is not necessarily a problem. It is at least unavoidable, and probably even good for design.