Embrace the Magpie!

Jeff Atwood says we should stop trying out the shiny new things! As the general population tends to agree, customers don't care what languages and tools we use. Jeff makes some good points. I would prefer a more positive and slight tweak to the approach, however: "Embrace the Magpie!"

Who cares what technology you use, as long as it works, and both you and your users are happy with it?

Where's the obsession with quality that we should have? What if I use a six year old development environment riddled with bugs? Sure, the code I develop works, but it's a pain to write code when my development environment crashes regularly. What if static typing and unquantifiable things are slowing my productivity? The ITAPPMONROBOT works, but just passing by it in the datacenter worries me to no end. The pursuit of shiny and new things is exactly my goal. But that's just it, it's my goal. There are two types of goals to make the distinction between: 1. Your personal goals (use shiny new things and anything else that makes me happy) 2. Your job's goals (make the customer happy through whatever means necessary) When I'm at work, I'm going to make sure the customer is happy. When I'm at home, however, I'm going to hack on the things I care about, and I will definitely play with the latest technology. I refuse to feel bad about embracing new technology. I'll dabble in each language and play with every tool, and take ideas from them all. The funny thing is, it'll actually have a pretty neat side effect of improving my ability to satisfy customers. Why do you think Google lets their employees devote part of their time to personal pursuits? When you really boil it down, the point of Jeff's post is simply: Don't read programming reddit at work :).