Blog Driven Development Will Fuck Up Your Software Project

We developers are a unique and unfortunately not so diverse group. When it comes to computers we love tinkering, experimenting and staying up on the latest and greatest. This proclivity can be detrimental to a software project.

Consider Bob. Bob loves development blogs. Bob checks his feed every morning and pores over tech articles. Bob starts every conversation with, “Hey have you heard of this cool new framework...” or “You should check out this new library...” or “Hmmm, this code doesn’t seem to work on last night’s latest Chromium source build”. Bob’s blogivity may seem harmless. But Bob is itching to play with his new toys. When Bob gets his next programming assignment he’s going to use them regardless of maintainability, scalability, interoperability or common sense. 

Got a legacy application written in Java? Well get ready to incorporate Node.js into your build plan because Bob just read about Node.js and guess what? He fucking loves Node.js but can’t tell you why! Just spent millions investing in an end-to-end Laravel PHP web application? Better make room for Symfony components because Bob heard Symfony’s DI is the shit! Have you been using a single package manager? Time to wake up and live! Bob’s latest commit requires pip, ant, composer, gradle, bower, brew, gem and something called vundle. WTF Bob!?

Bobs are everywhere. Chances are you have a Bob on your software development team. Bob suffers from something I call “Blog Driven Development”. BDD is difficult to combat because Bob is a super smart guy who meets deadlines, satisfies requirements and rarely writes bugs. Bob is a rockstar but if you wonder why your projects have seemingly infinite nuances, dependencies, complexities and are constantly in a broken state it’s worthwhile to ask Bob, “Hey, what blogs do you read?”. 

“Because it’s cool” is not a valid reason to jeopardize a project through the adoption of a new technology, framework, programming language or build process. Calm down Bob. Take a break from the blogs.