I’m on vacation. I heard the title of this post said during a theatre show that I had attended, and felt the need to steal it for this blog. The Starbase Zebra Blog has thusfar been an experiment for me, in that I’ve had absolutely no agenda with it at all other than to write every other day. But, I’d say that it seems as though the theme that has emerged is that it is about software development, or the stupider aspects of it. So, I feel like the phrase “You’re never too old to learn something stupid” is totally appropriate here, even though I’m not entirely sure what to write on that topic.
I do want to write a post about why I think Gunicorn is stupid. Several other people have actually already done that well, but I think I want to write about how to tell that something is stupid before using it. Gunicorn is a pretty good example of something that I should have been able to tell was stupid before using it. I still used it after I had a pretty good idea that it was not smart. I’m still using it now, which is perhaps the most silly thing, except this website gets zero legitimate traffic, so the specific ways in which Gunicorn is stupid largely don’t matter to me right now.
I want to write another post about how stupid fads spread in technology through the coercive influence of old people. Many of those old people are Adrift in the Sea of Nonsense. The other half of the equation is that people underneath them in the hierarchy don’t push back on their bad ideas, even a little bit, even very softly. Actually, I take the phrasing back, because it sounds like the older superiors are the cause of the problem, when the subordinates can also just be passive aggressively complying.
I feel like the phrase could also be one giant description of how software development should be, even with the stupidest parts of it. You should never be too old to learn anything if you want to work in this particular industry.
I think I’ll edit this post once I write these three other posts. I probably won’t write them until I come back from vacation. And it only looks like I broke the every-other-day cadence because of time zones. Maybe I’ll hack the time stamps when I get back also.