Buzzwords, buzzwords everywhere
Conference Software craft

Buzzwords, buzzwords everywhere

Do we behave like a child in a toy store?
Bartosz Mikulski
Bartosz Mikulski – 2 min read

I heard a lot of buzzwords at a conference, again. Sadly, it becomes the trend at IT conferences. Most talks are filled with buzzwords and abstract concepts.

Table of Contents

  1. The cult
  2. The cultist

Does anyone talk about real problems? I want to hear the “war stories.” I will not remember a 30-minute lecture about CRDTs or type-classes. Abstract concepts are interesting when you read a book about them, not when you listen to a talk.

The cult

I know we attend conferences to get inspired, but I feel that on Monday many attendees will wake up with a terrible hangover. On Monday they will realize that the awesome ideas do not apply to their CRUD applications. That is not the problem.

People who ignore the reality and try to apply the new concepts anyway are the problem. People who surf the wave of hype-driven development. They and their overengineered code.

We love the buzzwords. We love to hear about reactive, serverless, fully distributed evolutionary architectures for data-intensive applications. We are happy when someone tells us we need all of those things because they are the force multipliers.

We ignore the problems we have. Instead of that we want to focus on solving the problems we wish we had. We love the new, shiny things. We admire the cult of complexity. We want to listen to its preachers.

The cultist

If the software industry were a person, he would be an aggressive man in his early twenties who drinks too much. Someone who has a severe attitude problem and who cannot commit to a long-term relationship. A person who buys a lot of new, cool gadgets but quickly gets bored with them. A man who made his rented apartment look like a mess because of his hoarding disorder. Someone who one day will move to another place and leave the mess as a gift for the next tenant.

If this personification of the software industry lived in a Hollywood movie, he would have a family intervention. His relatives would try persuading him to stay sober, take responsibility and clean the home. In real life, he would probably end up in prison.

Our industry needs an intervention. Now.

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