Mining memories for the future

If you’ve been in this industry for more than a couple of years, you’ve no doubt seen some trends come and go among your tools. If you’ve seen more than a couple of job titles over the years, you’ve seen the same in process, team organization, strategies, and all that. And if you’ve primarily worked with Javascript and the frontend, you’ve seen this whole cycle on technologies and frameworks play out over the length of a couple of podcasts (and, also, my condolences).

Tools and techniques become passé and fall into disuse, then obscurity. Oftentimes this is for the best of reasons: we’ve discovered a better way to do things, or found that a conceptual pathway was a dead end. Sometimes, though, this fashion cycle masks the usefulness of both tools and ways of thought–or even ways of being.

Tools

Guard is a test (and other command/event) auto-runner for Ruby. It watches your configured project and, when a file is changed, it runs only the related tests. If you were learning to use Rails 10-15 years ago, you probably learned about it in your first project. Now, you’ll be hard pressed to find it deployed anywhere. It still works just fine, and when I introduce folks to it, they typically love it.

It just fell out of fashion when we started containerizing everything. Now it’s forgotten.

Techniques

I mean, I still think Test-Driven Development is great–but in a much more nuanced sense than “you must test exactly every function every time before you implement it”. By and large, TDD, too, has fallen out of vogue–in part due to oversimplification of its upsides, in part because the more popular ecosystems don’t have as wonderful tooling around them as some older ecosystems once did. This isn’t the place to sell you, dear reader, on a new worldview around TDD, but know that it can be a competitive advantage when other folks don’t think even to try it.

Product Concepts

Adium hails from the Instant Messaging era: a single application that could pull together the diaspora of various accounts from AOL, Microsoft, ICQ, Jabber, and more. All that has fallen by the wayside–but here we are again, spread across Slack, Mattermost, Microsoft Teams, Skype, Signal, Telegram, and so many more. And so along comes Beeper, which does the same thing as Adium did, but for the current suite of messaging ecosystems. They’re young and already being acquired by Automattic.

Process and Ritual

If all you’ve ever seen of Agile is the way most enterprises have rolled out their SCRUM-ish processes, the Agile Manifesto is downright revolutionary.

And as always, Venkat’s there to comment as well:

Do forgotten historical cheap tricks regain their vigor and leverage after a period of abandonment? Is it possible to systematically improve your sense of history, by approaching the subject in specific ways?

Venkatesh Rao, Tempo

You

Over the years, you’ve tried on many ways of being. What pathways have you integrated? Which ones have you left by the wayside? And, of the latter, are there some that you might yet pull in to your life as it now stands, giving you a unique perspective among your colleagues and peers?

The new and the fresh is exciting, and often for the best. But as you mature and get more experience, being able to mine your past for fully fleshed-out but forgotten concepts can turn into a superpower. Ignore it at your peril.