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42 lines
1.9 KiB
42 lines
1.9 KiB
5 years ago
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title = "Things I Learnt The Hard Way - Understand And Stay Away From Cargo Cult"
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date = 2019-06-25
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[taxonomies]
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tags = ["en-au", "books", "things i learnt", "cargo cult"]
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"[Cargo cult](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult)" is a type of cult
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which appeared in the Melanesia, in which the natives would build their copy
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of an airplane (no motor, 'cause they didn't have the knowledge to build one
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-- or even knew what went inside the airplane) in the hopes they would get the
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same results as a real airplane.
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In I.T., a "cargo cult" is the expectation that if you use the same tools as
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some big players, you'd end up getting the same results.
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One example: Netflix runs a large fleet of microservices daily; they use
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Spring Cloud; if we use Spring Cloud, we can also run a large fleet of
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microservices.
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Although it may sound correct in a first glance, things are not like that.
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There is much more to the Netflix fleet than just Spring Cloud.
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Sometimes, cargo cult can appear in a form of "fanaticism" about celebrities:
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[Fowler](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Fowler_(software_engineer)) said
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such and such pattern works this way and that's exactly what we should do.
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Just because Fowler is well know software engineer and architect and do have
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some very clever ideas, picking them and running exactly the way he described
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may do more harm than good -- basically, 'cause you'd end up applying a
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design pattern without worrying about solving your problem in the first place.
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Another example: "ProductX is sponsored by BigCompany, so it's good". It may
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be, but the fact that BigCompany is being ProductX doesn't immediately makes
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ProductX good, or even if it fits your solution. And there is much more
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[behind a product](/books/things-i-learnt/languages-are-more) than just its
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development.
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{{ chapters(prev_chapter_link="/books/things-i-learnt/languages-are-more", prev_chapter_title="A Language Is Much More Than A Language") }}
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