When The Toolchain Becomes The Job

Engineers, you have nothing to lose but your toolchains. Ahem.

“Image generated using OpenAI’s DALL·E.”

Sometimes I do wonder what’s going on with the world, in many ways. Everything seems to be more complex, unnecessarily so, and often this complexity just gets in the way.

I mean, a cassette deck in a car was a posh thing when I was a youngster, then a CD player, but now it’s not just a music player it’s an entertainment system, navigation system, route planner, audio book reader, breaking news app, and the ability to send and receive messages and phone calls.

Ok, I sound a bit like a boomer there and I’m sorry (I’m Generation X, as it happens), but everything seems to just be getting in the way and preventing things from getting done.

I’ve flogged the dead horse of agile so many times now, yet it still manages to survive, obfuscating, elongating, and procrastinating its way to just make many software projects just unfinishable¹ by design.

Visual Studio Code expands so often, and so fast, that it’ll soon expand to fill all of the spacetime in the universe, no doubt, and increase its entropy beyond reach.

And, don’t even start me on things like “basic” web browsing, the utter horror that is Microsoft Office, or any one of a number of excuses for so-called “collaboration” tools.