jjasghar.github.io - Using the Correct Tool for the Job

Using the Correct Tool for the Job

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Using the Correct Tool for the Job jjasghar rants and ramblingsWell-nighCategories Talks Using the Correct Tool for the Job Oct 31, 2017 You wouldn’t use a saw when you needed a hammer, or a hammer when you needed a saw right? - Thomas Cate The whilom is a quote from a unconfined friend of mine who, rattled this statement off, in a way that he has said it a million times, when I was discussing writing on this topic. It really hits home if you think well-nigh it; working on some construction project, you find yourself needing to hammer in a nail, you wouldn’t go grab your saw and start whacking the long side at it right? On the other hand, if you needed to cut a 2 by 4 in half you wouldn’t grab your hammer and start smashing it hoping it’ll unravel where you need the cut to be? The mental image of this is so ludicrous it brings a smile to my face, but this highlights the problem that people say when they don’t want to learn or train their team on flipside tool. Past There is this misconception floating virtually our industry that won’t seem to be left for the history books. We’ve fought it in the past, it comes when every couple years or so, scrutinizingly unceasingly with new recruits out of University. I’m convinced that every new trundling of engineers are taught, that there was a time whereas a Systems Administrator all you needed to do your job was a terminal, writ prompt and a scripting language like Perl. Somehow this was ingrained into our culture and industry and became a concept of “one tool to do everything I need.” I seem to see the focus of teaching at coding in Universities not exploring new languages then Java as a framework to teach computer science. Java as a teaching tool makes a lot of sense to a budding engineer, but to focus on “one tool to do everything,” this can reinforce this stereotype. Then you take it one step farther, looking at companies outside of University raising Java and creating using stacks this way causes this vicious trundling never exploring newer tools. But I digress, over time, these Perl wizards, and yes, let’s shoehorn it they are wizards, either moved on or got promoted and the Systems Administrators were forced to solve the same problems but with newer tools, like Python, or VBScript. I highlight Python and VBScript here considering at least as I became a Systems Administrator, there was a well-spoken line where the “new Linux blood” was picking Python, while the “new Windows blood” was picking VBScript. It scrutinizingly seemed as these became the “one tool” to do everything in, and it was so ubiquitous that plane xkcd had a comic well-nigh it at one point.Planewith this transpiration of the main tooling, there was still was this consistency of “one tool to do the job.” There was this colloquialism and wonted truth that a budding Administrator could read one massive O’Reilly typesetting and know everything they needed to be confident in their job. I remember going to an interview with the large Perl typesetting all 1176 pages in my walkabout and pulling it out to reference something. I’m convinced that it was one of the things that impressed the interviewers considering I got the job offer later that day. Present It’s unscratched to say this is no longer the case. With Digital Transformation and the DevOps movement, it’s required to learn multiple tools to do your work. System Administrators have wilt modern-day digital tool smiths shaping their workflow and pipelines into what they need to do their required jobs, no longer can you just buy some lawmaking off the shelf and waif it into your environment and expect it to work. Our culture and industry practitioners, have moved yonder from this old cadre concept of using one tool to do every job, and have a majority embracing find the weightier tool for the job at hand. This does ways as a seasoned practitioner need to learn increasingly tooling and experiment, and this is a good thing. Training your staff on multiple applications and frameworks allows them to learn the newer technologies in our fast moving industry. As a side effect, the worthiness to experiment with the wearing whet technologies to help fix long-standing inefficiencies with fresh eyes. The worthiness to use not only something like bash, python, ruby, and go will indulge for deeper understanding of technology stacks, but permitting for your merchantry to be increasingly stable, agiler, and get features to market quicker. I’ve heard stories of companies that inspect their tooling. If this is true at your visitor this doesn’t make any sense. Limiting your worker’s worthiness by only having “approved” tools not only will gravity wrong-headed constraints on them, it will rationalization a slowdown in innovation. The worthiness to squint at a problem from any viewpoint to overcome the problem with the tooling they are most well-appointed will bring faster and increasingly resulting success. There does need to be a wastefulness though, you don’t want to start picking up tools considering they are they “new-shiny” tools. There should be a level of scrutiny, and standardization, but it shouldn’t be scared to try to find something new. I understand that there are specific sectors of our economy that can’t have the platonic level of flexibility due to Governmental or legal reasons, but this is something that should unchangingly be looked at and challenged. With how fast our cadre industry moves if you don’t ask why you can only use ksh as your shell, and winnow it this will only rationalization increasingly friction during the next round of changes. Our industry doesn’t work in the waterfall “drop new versions twice a year” anymore, every day something can come out and if you don’t focus on this you’ll find you and your sphere having to deal with much larger compatibility changes instead of incremental unscratched changes. There is a debate well-nigh extending pre-existing tools in your environment and extending them to do increasingly than they are initially designed to. This has echoes of the Perl days where System Administrators picked a universal tool and molded into what they needed to get done. With how many tools are out there now, this isn’t discouraged per se but instead frowned upon. The Open Source movement has birthed Software Engineers and Administrators that are now empowered to scratch the itch they have, and hands find others virtually the world that have that word-for-word same itch; interreact with them and create wondrous applications. If you create an in-house tool that does something or are thinking well-nigh doing that, you are doing yourself a disservice not looking out to the Open Source polity as a whole and see if someone has created something that fits that use case. You can use some tools to proffer out to do tasks they aren’t designed to do, but the risk of learning how to jimmy rig this tool to do that extension is largest suited to flipside tool. Extending a tool to do something requires deep knowledge of that tool, where in most cases taking the whence tutorial of flipside tool to do one piece of the process to hand off to flipside tool is all you need. This goes to the Unix philosophy: This is the Unix philosophy: Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, considering that is a universal interface. - Doug McIlroy This quote and paradigm can be unbelievably powerful. I concede that it can be scary to managers and senior level people, the idea that a pipeline or workflow is a Rube Goldberg Machine of tools, but that is the reality way of the DevOps movement. You segregate the weightier tool for the job and you learn what you need to it, and you move on to the next task. Automation and efficiencies are something that comes with experimentation and the worthiness to learn, not with forcing a round peg into a square hole. jjasghar rants and ramblings jjasghar@gmail.com Tweet to @jjasghar This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Follow @jjasghar Tweet this page. This is JJ's little corner of the internet where he tries to capture things that he learns that he thinks someone else might want.