Building Cool Things with “uncool tech”
I grew up with parents constantly reminding me of the “throwaway consumerist society” we live in. They constantly reminded me of the not so great reality of our society that has a trend of throwing away things that don’t work for us or don’t work the way we would like them to work anymore. We tend to go out with the old and in with the new. Sometimes this is needed ,but when it comes to people, relationships and many other things that we are really reliant on, then we need a different approach. This cant be our default to response when things go wrong. In modern medicine there seems to be a trend towards alleviating symptoms (especially with dangerous pharmaceutical drugs) as opposed to dealing with the root cause of an issue.
Addressing the root cause of a problem would alleviate the symptoms of a problem or even disease on the longterm.
We see this same problem in the tech world. People working with a tool or library of some sort for ages and then they run
into what feels like a big problem and ditch that tool or library for something more shiny, more “cool” from a tech point of view instead of dealing with the problem directly.
A good example is how most of us went from working comfortable with Apache2 for years and then after the slowloris thing
how most of us hopped from Apache2 to Nginx in no time. We are all guilty of this problem in tech, even the people using OpenBSD are guilty of this, well kinda.
In OpenBSD 5.5 version 1.3 of Apache was removed in favour of Nginx, see here: http://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade55.html . Nginx was then later removed in favour of OpenBSD’s own “httpd”, see here for more info: https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=140908174910713&w=2
What happened here is rather interesting. I’ll try explain it in simple terms. Basically what happens is that the OpenBSD project took out Apache2 and replaced it with Nginx. They then forked a load balancer and SSL gateway called “relayd” and called the fork httpd. They then switched out Nginx for the less problematic httpd.
Here is an article for some context on httpd: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OpenBSD-5.7-HTTPD-Nginx
Here is a really cool presentation from AsiaBSDCon 2015 on httpd: http://www.openbsd.org/papers/httpd-slides-asiabsdcon2015.pdf
The points I’m trying to make with this article are:
- The guys from OpenBSD are amazing programmers.
- Consumerism is not software development
- Make cool stuff with not so shiny tech if you can.
We are raising, training or producing developers who only want to work with the “coolest” tech. To “build” things with frameworks. What are we really building? Are we just putting lego blocks together as opposed to making lego blocks.
This is kind of a bad trend in my opinion. What we really should be aspiring toward is to create developers that are multi faceted and willing to create really cool tech with really not so cool tech, who can work with what they
have, even if they don’t really want to.
