> I don't think microservices, react, functional programming or no sql are examples of 'hype'; I think those are good engineering decisions (depending on the pr

> I don't think microservices, react, functional programming or no sql are examples of 'hype'; I think those are good engineering decisions (depending on the problem domain). > I mean, I get what the article is saying, yeah yeah, avoid the hype, don't drink the 'webscale' cool-aid... I feel like you're shooting right past the author's point here. What he's saying is that hype, as in the shared excitement, obscures the actual tradeoffs involved in adopting the new technology, and makes it harder to make good engineering decisions. I'd like to add that it also obscures the available alternatives - simple and straightforward ways to configure / extend existing technologies to have the same behavior / features as that shiny new thing. And it's not even about what you know ahead of time. I was actually thinking about this earlier today: I often recognize some of the tradeoffs of adopting a new tech early on, but my judgement still often ends up clouded by enthusiasm. A common pattern of rationalization I often have goes like this: "Sure this old thing can be used to do the same as this new thing by using functions X,Y,Z, but this new thing lets you do it with just one function. I mean sure, I could write that function myself in about 10 lines, and I only need to do this once for each project, but this is just easier." I'm not saying that this reasoning is wrong, only that it is biased. Tradeoffs of a technology, and therefore knowing in which problem domain they are most appropriate, consist of both pros and cons. The problem with hype isn't that the technology being hyped is not excellent in its own way, the problem is that (psychologically) hype leads us to ignore the cons, to rationalize them away - and this means we're not really fairly considering the tradeoffs. The author isn't saying that microservices, react, Elixir, NoSQL, etc don't have upsides, but only that (if we are not extra careful) we might not be considering the tradeoffs and alternatives as pragmatically as we think we do.