Cargo Cult

• Dogma

• Be aware of trusting others advice

  • Where are the facts, the evidence

  • use of scientific method should stop this

    • use 5 whys

  • If someone is giving out advice I want to know – “Have you done that? Have you experienced this problem, or is it just theoretical?”

    • Where have you used it? Is it applicable to this case?

  • A contradiction that you can find in the rule/law should be easily disproved if rule is true

    • understand issues with edge cases, too many and the coverage of the rule grows smaller

• Most things that are stated as fact, are generally just advice/anecdote/experience

  • still useful, but should be take as law/rules

  • Perfect is impossible, there are trade offs (positives and negatives)

• Habit is a dangerous thing, so is flow

  • People use what is already there without questioning it, see if it works, getting metrics

  • This propagates problems, until becomes normalised

Example - performance

• due to the advances in science and engineering, computers have become cheap and resources abundent.

• Led to devs not caring too much about performance, about how memory is used, as long as it works as vertical scaling is always avaiable or we never reach the max resouce limit

• No consideration for others, ie other apps being used at the same time

• Always wanting overkill for something that simpler

Links

https://nmondal.github.io/assets/pdfs/eng.pdf