| > Never jump on the new thing. Always lean toward the simple thing. Always prefer tools closer to your core competencies. This is correct, but it is also a balancing act. Sometimes the new thing is better. Sometimes it is simpler in important ways that provide leverage in the long run, despite being complex in other ways that create confusion in the present. Sometimes you need to learn new tools and shift your core competencies toward them. An analogy: Nobody writes directly in machine code anymore. Symbolic assemblers were new technology that was better. The early ones may have been buggy, and it may have been simpler to just write it by hand instead of debugging your own code and the assembler, but eventually it paid off. Your core competency may have been writing machine code, but once the assemblers became good enough, it made more sense to be competent at using them. Very few new technologies represent such a massive and obvious level-up as that, and it is unwise to chase everything in hopes that it will be one of those paradigm-shifters, but it is equally unwise to hide your head in the sand, believing that all new things are necessarily complex and unworthy. I have been, and remain, skeptical of Meteor itself, but the problems it is targeting are real, and I think it and other projects are circling in on good approaches to solving them, which is worth paying attention to. |