Changing your mind about tech

Scott Davis: I think that it's important to be able to change your mind professionally. You have to ensure that you never get so dug into a position that you can't back out or make an opposing argument later.

One thing that I try to do, whenever I'm advocating a tech, is point out its shortcomings as well as its strengths. That kind of balanced approach is what I look for in conference speakers too. If they aren't able to say one nice thing about another tech, or one bad thing about their own, that's when I get suspicious and my spidey senses start tingling.

Neal Ford popularized the "Suck/Rock Dichotomy." This is when people say, "This framework is the best thing ever! That framework is the worst thing ever! Mine rocks! Yours sucks!"

Since we're programmers, it's easy to slip into a purely binary mindset: 1 or 0, true or false, black or white, good or bad, and so on.

The real world, of course, is a wee bit more nuanced than that. I like reminding developers who use the binary argument as a rhetorical crutch that it takes 8 bits to make a byte. Every single character that you type on the screen is a healthy mix of 1s and 0s.

Geertjan Wielenga: Thank you, Scott Davis.