The Obligatory "Hello World" Post

While I’m not generally one for adhering to tradition, there are some that I appreciate. The “Hello World” idiom is one of them.

Of course, nerds starting their blog like this is inherited from the practice of posting a “Hello World” message as the initial tutorial for pretty much any programming language, framework or similar tech; especially F/LOSS ones.

I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with this. Adopting common traditions is an important part of building a shared culture. Libre/copyleft culture is definitely one worth cultivating.

But then there are those who are wow’d by essentially a hello-world example of some new tech, and then won’t stop with “Look how easy X tech makes Y task!” I mean, sure, that’s nice. But it’s usually some trivial implementation that ignores security and all the other complexity that comes with real-world scenarios.

In my experience, those who buy into such hype have a shallow understanding of both the new tech and the existing tooling it’s meant to supplant. So it’s often also accompanied with some level of derision for tried and true solutions. “New” != “better”.

Do you really need to build that mostly static brochure website on a headless CMS with this week’s hot JS framework (hosted on k8s, of course)? There are definitely use-cases where such choices are justified. But is it really what’s best for this project?

I take pride in the professional practice of systems design and engineering. An everything-looks-like-a-nail approach is detrimental to our industry as a whole.

But, that’s just like, my opinion. Take it or leave it. 🤷