There's still no silver bullet

Saying “use the right tool for the job” is easy, but actually selecting the right tool for the job is anything but. Good tools are hard to find, hard to evaluate, hard to learn. We have constraints, we have biases, we have shortcomings.

But that’s all part of the work.

And if you “just use Go” or “just use React” or “just use Postgres” for every problem that crosses your keyboard, you’re just not putting in the work.

I’ve only worked in agencies my entire professional career, and that work has honed two important traits of a good engineer: curiousity and agility.

Being curious gives you the ability to explore new tools and understand how they work.

Being agile (not in the project management sense, but the “moving freely and quickly” sense) gives you the ability to deploy those tools to solve increasingly complex problems.

It’s not that I don’t have a standard set of tools I reach for when solving a wide swatch of problems (Rails, Postgres, etc.), but as I get older, I’m finding that I am more willing to engage with newer tech.

I come from a background of writing Javascript by hand, but I'm starting to play more with Vue and React, and I can see why people like these tools.

Same thing with CI/CD pipelines. I always thought they were more fiddle-y and brittle than they were worth, but that's because I've generally been a lone wolf. In a team context, they are extremely useful.

If you keep hearing noise about a new technology, it's probably worth taking a look over the fence to see how that tool could be used.