technology is the tool, not the goal

As technologists most of us have a deep curiosity and interest in technology and how it is applied in the world. The volume of tools we have at our disposal to solve both our personal and vocational problems can be overwhelming. But technology is just that, it's a tool to solve a problem, it should never become the goal itself. Cargo cultism I was having a conversation with a friend recently who had an interesting conversation at work. Someone had told him that his team was essentially stuck in the past, and that they have not kept up on the latest technologies. This is something I hear a lot, and these conversations border on cult-like behavior. Let's look at a few quotes: "We are moving our entire codebase to Rust for the memory safety." "Why are you still using SQL Server? You should move to Postgres and save all that license money you pay to Micro$oft." "You should really move that to serverless, it's where the industry is going." "You should really use Go or Rust for that,…