Building Ambisonia.com

What’s the impact of making a bad technology choice?

I’ve made the wrong technology choice several times now. What I’ve learnt is never commit to a technology. Stay loose, dont be afraid to move to an entirely new technology. Implement everything as loosely connected parts.

HTTP based APIs are good, shell scripts are good etc… choose an architecture where you can easily and quickly replace parts with entirely new technologies.

You know when you’ve made a bad technology choice when your battling, not building. You know you’ve made a bad technology choice when you keep postponing implementing something really important because you know it will be a shit fight difficult.

A bad technology choice is a ball and chain. A good technology choice empowers. The cost of switching from one to the other will not matter when you’re sprinting away on the other side of the fence.

I used to tear my hair out trying to get Plone to do what I wanted. Arghh. I used to think,” just stay with it, you’ve come this far, it will take too much to swap from scratch now.” Wrong wrong wrong. Should have just moved on.

A bad technology choice never goes away.

One of the reasons I have been hesitant to move away from Ruby Shoes is because I’ve put so much effort into the Shoes uploader. Wrong wrong wrong. I should have moved on much much earlier.

I’ve finally found a workable solution to the cross platform uploader. It took me about 3 days to code it up. 3 days! … I’ve spent longer than that just trying to get Net::http working in Shoes.

The block to moving, I guess, is fear of the unknown. For some reason it seems much easier to stay with a bad solution that try to explore for newer solutions. Better the devil you know. Hah. That’s so wrong.