6 ms·

Stop tech-driven problem-solving

73 points by todayispotato 9y ago

FrankyHollywood 9y ago
Every new technology needs firing up, which means hype it and hope some people can do something usefull with it. It's hard to imagine new technology without hype, how else can a large group of people be aware of it existing at all? The Amish decide 200 years ago 'lets stick with current technology'. It works, they have houses, food, friends, a living. Why go further? This topic is almost existential :)
- icebraining 9y ago
  Not even the Amish are unanimous on what technology should actually be used, though :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish#Use_of_technology_by_different_Amish_affiliations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish#Use_of_technology_by_dif...
dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
The author makes several important points, but I'm not sure he fully understands the mechanics of the market. As a founder, I don't necessarily have to think about solving a problem or making money. I just need to gather enough users. Once I go past a certain threshold, I can sell the company (with the users being the main value), and this is what many of my friends are trying to do. Of course at the heart of the app/service there is some benefit to the user, but few people have the illusion they're solving some world problems - they just want to find a smart way to earn substantial money while doing what they know and like to do.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  Most people I know that started business, cared about their company, not about turning the company into a product to sell.
- mbillie1 9y ago
  > As a founder, I don't necessarily have to think about solving a problem or making money. I just need to gather enough users. Once I go past a certain threshold, I can sell the company (with the users being the main value), and this is what many of my friends are trying to do. The valley sickness in a nutshell.
- todayispotato 9y ago
  I'm not arguing about creating valuation on the market for founders. There are plenty of ways, on a sliding moral scale, to create a high valuation. I don't care about that. I argue for creating actual value for users, on the long term.
lvoudour 9y ago
I think the title of the article does not accurately reflect the author's thesis, which is more like "trending tech may not be the best solution to your problem". I agree that riding the hype train instead of using established "mundane" tools is probably a bad idea for most problems, but exploring existing tech that might help you also qualifies as "tech-driven problem-solving" IMHO
- marktangotango 9y ago
  I've worked at a large financial services company and a large medical billing company who both thought they could use big data and machine learning to monetize customers(!) data. Niether had expertise with either. One muddled through with local talent, the other brought in a ph.d ML guy. Both spent millions and got nothing in return. Anecedotal, but representative I believe.
  - Systemic33 9y ago
    EDIT: Completely agree with your comment, and I've had similar anecdotal experiences. 1st rule of Big Data Club Decide what knowledge you want to get — Then explore how you can generate information that can support this give you this knowledge, and finally you can begin to exploit the data you have at your disposal to generate this information. The trick is not to generate lots of data, but to know how to extract information from it. Big Data™ Tools can assist in exploiting the data you have, to generate new more meaningful data, but that doesn't make it information, it's just more data. Note that I distinguish between knowledge, information, and data.
  - lvoudour 9y ago
    I don't know how big those companies are, but they may qualify for big data if they have millions of users or enormous datasets to analyze. The question is, what's the advantage compared to other methods? Is being "left behind" a valid concern for the company's business or is it just a teenager's version of "left behind"?
    - gaius 9y ago
cousin_it 9y ago
Also known as "fad", "buzzword" or "solution looking for a problem". The blockchain and big data are good examples. Some past examples are the internet of things and the semantic web.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
jasode 9y ago
Author provides 2 examples: (1) blockchain and (2) big data Hadoop map reduce (1) blockchain: most arguments about blockchain always being replaceable with a traditional single node central database conveniently leaves out the constraint for decentralized control. Yes, if you change the ideal goals for the solution, of course you can propose the traditional solution. (E.g. a government central database of property records does not solve the same problem as a decentralized blockchain of property records.) The problems that blockchains are attempting to solve is real. The more interesting discussion is whether the costs of implementation (whether Proof-of-Work or Proof-of-Stake) will ever deliver on that promise. Two possibilities: (1) subsequent failed attempts of blockchains eventually lead computer scientists to a theorem that states any decentralized scheme always costs more than the economic value returned. (The theorem would be similar to the ironclad conclusions of CAP theorem or Godel's Incompleteness Theorem and also similar to discovering you _can_ synthesize gold but the cost (of a nuclear reactor) to do it costs more than the gold itself.) Or (2) more computer science thinking finally makes blockchains feasible for real world applications. Feasibility includes cpu costs, transactions-per-second, 51% attacks, rogue forks, etc. (2) Hadoop map reduce: he writes... >"The entire business plan of a ton of companies [...] set up these huge data clusters based on Hadoop and write complex MapReduce queries for basic operations, and wait for the spice to flow. But there’s no end game. When asked, there’s no vision on what to do with the data that will actually make money" Author should spell out exactly which data companies are spending millions gathering hundreds of terabytes/petabytes with zero clue what to do with it. Yes, there are all sorts of examples out there of "solutions looking for a problem" but this particular essay is empty of insightful data points.
- dilemma 9y ago
  Blockchain isn't decentralized. The network is run by a handful of companies, mainly in China.
  - jasode 9y ago
    I was talking about blockchains. Are you talking about Bitcoin? blockchain != Bitcoin blockchain != Ethereum
anovikov 9y ago
Big data: they nailed it! Every single application of 'big data' i ever saw was hype-driven, and much easier solved by boring, traditional things that were there in K&R era already: hash maps, Berkeley DB, and memory-mapped files. Sometimes taking 100x less resources, like literally doing on a single computer what took a huge Hadoop cluster. Maybe on a Google scale of data, that doesn't work as easily. Maybe when you have a billion dollar infrastructure bill, big data works better. But it leaves out 99% of companies who's data isn't that big.
- justadeveloper2 9y ago
  Shut your mouth--I can't keep charging $250/hr. unless people BELIEVE! But seriously, I just came off a project last year that used Hadoop "because" and for no other discernible reason. I personally did a ton of studying on Data Science and then...crickets. Couldn't find anyone who really wanted that kind of work done. Maybe in time.
  - savman 9y ago
    I'd be curious if anyone else has had the same experience re: Data Science. From what I've seen so far it seems like the super big tech companies pay _all the money_ for ML/DS people; outside of that the pickings seem to get slim quick.
    - marcosdumay 9y ago
      In all fairness, the super big companies (not only tech) are the only ones with any big data.
- virmundi 9y ago
  I used Hadoop well on an important fraud system. When we first deployed, we only dealt with 59 GB at rest worth of data per day. What I knew would occur is more models would run over the data with each release. I assumed that the models would become more complex over time. They would eventually need to perform calculations overs years worth of data. Hadoop provided a data-centric approach to parallel computing. Using Cascading, a high level pipe/filter library for Hadoop, we could make complex, locally testable models. Using eventing we could plug those models into a self-managing workflow. Adding a new model meant starting a JVM for that model that hooked into the event system and ran Hadoop jobs as needed. If any one model failed, we could rerun it without affecting the rest of the system. This scaled to 60 some odd fraud models that looked over up to 5 years worth of data (5 TB). Some were quick since they only looked at a day's worth of data. Some took several hours. In the end, Hadoop made the entire process easier to handle mentally, testable, and scalable.
bitwize 9y ago
Funnily enough, microcomputers themselves were once the technology solution in search of a problem. The "home computer" fad of the 80s promised lots of applications that didn't quite pan out, including finance, "helping kids with the homework", "the little lady can store her recipes", and home automation. The only ones that really panned out were games (including edutainment), spreadsheets, word processing, and maybe small single-user databases. Anything more required much more sophisticated and expensive equipment, which wouldn't become commonplace till around the 386 era.
- le-mark 9y ago
  >> the little lady can store her recipes That's a great perspective, and I'm really glad you mentioned this in particular. It's one of those things that was so often repeated, and I always found it to be really bizarre. Recipes? Really? I'd add music synth to your list of real world uses, in some sense that was a killer app for microprocessors.
  - syntheticnature 9y ago
    It was probably one of the more obvious examples for a simple non-relational database, neglecting that those early implementations tended to not have any advantages over a card file, and often made things less usable.
  - cr0sh 9y ago
    This machine - a 16-bit computer from 1969 (!) - was marketed as a "kitchen computer", among other things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeywell_316 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeywell_316 Seriously.
  - bitwize 9y ago
    > I'd add music synth to your list of real world uses, in some sense that was a killer app for microprocessors. You're right. The Altair 8080 famously didn't do anything useful at all upon its release. It wasn't until someone in the Homebrew Computer Club discovered that the radio interference its CPU generated could play tones on an AM radio by buzzing the CPU in loops that a use was found for it.
jesperlang 9y ago
I think the author has an interesting direction but don't quite like the examples.. Taking a step back and looking at it more generally I see this as problem solving vs problem finding (in Alan Kay's words), where a perfect example would be the hype with self driving cars and high speed car tunnels. This is problem solving (traffic jams, car accidents, "I need to get there faster"). Whereas problem finding will ask the bigger questions that will lead to better results. In the question of transportation I think you should set up yourself to the problem "How do we build car free cities?"
- virmundi 9y ago
  Keep expanding your problem field. How do you create a car free society? I live in Palatka, FL. A small town that's great for tech since housing is low cost and we have reasonably fast Internet to facilitate remote work or cloud based solution development. But to get anything other than food, I have to travel at least 45 minutes to St Augustine unless I purchase online. This means I need a car. For example, I have 12 5/4 cedar boards in my wife's car for storm window frames. I had to drive her Vibe to Jacksonville, which is an hour drive one way. No one around here sells cedar, let alone in 5/4 width. I can't get that delivered. Even if I wanted to, I need to pick the boards since I have aesthetic requirements. How do we solve the small town problem?
  - icebraining 9y ago
    Not that I'm actually arguing for eliminating cars from small towns: The solution is public transport; it seems you already have a train that goes to Jacksonville, though it's rather slow; the Brussels-Bruges line is about the same distance and takes only 1h, even with intermediate stops. As for not having delivery, that's solved by the question itself: if people didn't have cars, they would definitively deliver! As for choosing the boards, that's hardly a problem, you go to the shop, choose them and they'd package those specific boards and deliver them. That's fairly common for large items, at least here in Europe, where people (even small town dwellers) tend to have small cars.
    - 9y ago
_lex 9y ago
This article makes a ton of sense for people in smaller companies that aren't worried about rapidly shifting markets and the long time-to-delivery of new functionality that is made possible by technology. He's effectively arguing "why build android when j2me already exists". The problem is that when the iphone comes out, you want something you can quickly retool into a competitive product - otherwise you might get killed by the movement of the market itself. See blackberry & windows mobile for what happens when you're too late to the game. Now, you could argue that it makes more sense to try to make the iPhone instead of a me-too system like android originally was. But most companies aren't apple of 2005, and they know it. They know they aren't really leading in anything - they just don't want to be left in the dust. So they ask their tech teams to investigate stuff that might be transformational, like the blockchain, because if it did create a new green field, they want to have access to the new market and at least near-first mover advantage.
- todayispotato 9y ago
  I'm afraid you then might have missed my point by a little bit. Let me try and clarify. I think new technologies are awesome. But I think you shouldn't look at a technology and ask "which problems should I solve with this?", but rather at the problems you have and then consider "which technologies should I use to solve this problem?". The last one does mean you have to become good at identifying problems in your company or product offering, which is much harder than finding technologies. But I think that is a very worthwhile goal.
whipoodle 9y ago
Sure, but look a little wider. Most of what goes on is bullshit. Not just tech crap. We're all just trying to make a little money.
- todayispotato 9y ago
  Yes you're right. But next to making money, a lot of us are also doing our best to do something valuable and worthwhile. It's just an attempt to get people to think in a slightly different direction.
flavio81 9y ago
The author should also mention the following modern techniques used in hype-driven software development: - microservices architecture - using document data stores despite your data being relational
- todayispotato 9y ago
  I should have really used the latter...
jondubois 9y ago
Hype in tech is terrible. If a technology gets an unusual amount of hype, it's a sign that you should wait a few years before you consider adopting it. Real consensus about a specific technology stack takes at least a couple of years to build up. If a tech product becomes popular very quickly, it is purely because of its superficial qualities - Often at the expense of finer details.
unixhero 9y ago
Interesting quibble.
jaclaz 9y ago
The linked to document is unavailable, but there is a google cache of it: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:bZt3Y3meUJYJ:https://www.stichtsevecht.nl/bestuur/pers_42531/item/onderzoek-innovatieve-technologie-voor-verbeterde-dienstverlening-in-het-sociaal-domein_56332.html%2Bonderzoek-innovatieve-technologie-voor-verbeterde-dienstverlening-in-het-sociaal-domein_56332.html http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:bZt3Y3m... Which is not that bad in Google translate. Essentially: Blockchain when requesting wheelchairs Blockchain is a new technology whose impact is compared to the arrival of the Internet. The Quality Institute of Dutch Municipalities (KING) organizes pilots to investigate what Blockchain technology can mean for municipalities. Stichtse fought with the research question whether Blockchain is useful when requesting a wheelchair. The pilot shows that Blockchain can offer many benefits. For example, the process of requesting issue with Blockchain is faster and more transparent. Residents with Blockchain have more views on the status of their application, as with Track & Trace in a mail package. In addition, the administration around the application becomes a lot easier for all parties. On the original page there is a link to a dedicated site: http://hostedby.frogjump.nl/blockchain-magazine#!/stichtse-vecht http://hostedby.frogjump.nl/blockchain-magazine#!/stichtse-v... where there is a link to an actual .pdf (largely in English): http://cdn.instantmagazine.com/upload/6826/blockchain-stichtsevecht.3d0bc1fbf62d.pdf http://cdn.instantmagazine.com/upload/6826/blockchain-sticht... with a detailed process analysis from which it is clear how the "blockchain" has actually no meaning/usefulness in the whole stuff the "problem" (or "non problem") can seemingly be solved by much more traditional technical approaches (which is the article Author's thesis).

73 points by todayispotato 9y ago

Every new technology needs firing up, which means hype it and hope some people can do something usefull with it. It's hard to imagine new technology without hype, how else can a large group of people be aware of it existing at all? The Amish decide 200 years ago 'lets stick with current technology'. It works, they have houses, food, friends, a living. Why go further? This topic is almost existential :)

icebraining 9y ago
Not even the Amish are unanimous on what technology should actually be used, though :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish#Use_of_technology_by_different_Amish_affiliations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish#Use_of_technology_by_dif...

dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago

The author makes several important points, but I'm not sure he fully understands the mechanics of the market. As a founder, I don't necessarily have to think about solving a problem or making money. I just need to gather enough users. Once I go past a certain threshold, I can sell the company (with the users being the main value), and this is what many of my friends are trying to do. Of course at the heart of the app/service there is some benefit to the user, but few people have the illusion they're solving some world problems - they just want to find a smart way to earn substantial money while doing what they know and like to do.

pjmlp 9y ago
Most people I know that started business, cared about their company, not about turning the company into a product to sell.
mbillie1 9y ago
> As a founder, I don't necessarily have to think about solving a problem or making money. I just need to gather enough users. Once I go past a certain threshold, I can sell the company (with the users being the main value), and this is what many of my friends are trying to do. The valley sickness in a nutshell.
todayispotato 9y ago
I'm not arguing about creating valuation on the market for founders. There are plenty of ways, on a sliding moral scale, to create a high valuation. I don't care about that. I argue for creating actual value for users, on the long term.

lvoudour 9y ago

I think the title of the article does not accurately reflect the author's thesis, which is more like "trending tech may not be the best solution to your problem". I agree that riding the hype train instead of using established "mundane" tools is probably a bad idea for most problems, but exploring existing tech that might help you also qualifies as "tech-driven problem-solving" IMHO

marktangotango 9y ago
I've worked at a large financial services company and a large medical billing company who both thought they could use big data and machine learning to monetize customers(!) data. Niether had expertise with either. One muddled through with local talent, the other brought in a ph.d ML guy. Both spent millions and got nothing in return. Anecedotal, but representative I believe.
- Systemic33 9y ago
  EDIT: Completely agree with your comment, and I've had similar anecdotal experiences. 1st rule of Big Data Club Decide what knowledge you want to get — Then explore how you can generate information that can support this give you this knowledge, and finally you can begin to exploit the data you have at your disposal to generate this information. The trick is not to generate lots of data, but to know how to extract information from it. Big Data™ Tools can assist in exploiting the data you have, to generate new more meaningful data, but that doesn't make it information, it's just more data. Note that I distinguish between knowledge, information, and data.
- lvoudour 9y ago
  I don't know how big those companies are, but they may qualify for big data if they have millions of users or enormous datasets to analyze. The question is, what's the advantage compared to other methods? Is being "left behind" a valid concern for the company's business or is it just a teenager's version of "left behind"?
  - gaius 9y ago

cousin_it 9y ago

Also known as "fad", "buzzword" or "solution looking for a problem". The blockchain and big data are good examples. Some past examples are the internet of things and the semantic web.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

jasode 9y ago

Author provides 2 examples: (1) blockchain and (2) big data Hadoop map reduce (1) blockchain: most arguments about blockchain always being replaceable with a traditional single node central database conveniently leaves out the constraint for decentralized control. Yes, if you change the ideal goals for the solution, of course you can propose the traditional solution. (E.g. a government central database of property records does not solve the same problem as a decentralized blockchain of property records.) The problems that blockchains are attempting to solve is real. The more interesting discussion is whether the costs of implementation (whether Proof-of-Work or Proof-of-Stake) will ever deliver on that promise. Two possibilities: (1) subsequent failed attempts of blockchains eventually lead computer scientists to a theorem that states any decentralized scheme always costs more than the economic value returned. (The theorem would be similar to the ironclad conclusions of CAP theorem or Godel's Incompleteness Theorem and also similar to discovering you _can_ synthesize gold but the cost (of a nuclear reactor) to do it costs more than the gold itself.) Or (2) more computer science thinking finally makes blockchains feasible for real world applications. Feasibility includes cpu costs, transactions-per-second, 51% attacks, rogue forks, etc. (2) Hadoop map reduce: he writes... >"The entire business plan of a ton of companies [...] set up these huge data clusters based on Hadoop and write complex MapReduce queries for basic operations, and wait for the spice to flow. But there’s no end game. When asked, there’s no vision on what to do with the data that will actually make money" Author should spell out exactly which data companies are spending millions gathering hundreds of terabytes/petabytes with zero clue what to do with it. Yes, there are all sorts of examples out there of "solutions looking for a problem" but this particular essay is empty of insightful data points.

dilemma 9y ago
Blockchain isn't decentralized. The network is run by a handful of companies, mainly in China.
- jasode 9y ago
  I was talking about blockchains. Are you talking about Bitcoin? blockchain != Bitcoin blockchain != Ethereum

anovikov 9y ago

Big data: they nailed it! Every single application of 'big data' i ever saw was hype-driven, and much easier solved by boring, traditional things that were there in K&R era already: hash maps, Berkeley DB, and memory-mapped files. Sometimes taking 100x less resources, like literally doing on a single computer what took a huge Hadoop cluster. Maybe on a Google scale of data, that doesn't work as easily. Maybe when you have a billion dollar infrastructure bill, big data works better. But it leaves out 99% of companies who's data isn't that big.

justadeveloper2 9y ago
Shut your mouth--I can't keep charging $250/hr. unless people BELIEVE! But seriously, I just came off a project last year that used Hadoop "because" and for no other discernible reason. I personally did a ton of studying on Data Science and then...crickets. Couldn't find anyone who really wanted that kind of work done. Maybe in time.
- savman 9y ago
  I'd be curious if anyone else has had the same experience re: Data Science. From what I've seen so far it seems like the super big tech companies pay _all the money_ for ML/DS people; outside of that the pickings seem to get slim quick.
  - marcosdumay 9y ago
    In all fairness, the super big companies (not only tech) are the only ones with any big data.
virmundi 9y ago
I used Hadoop well on an important fraud system. When we first deployed, we only dealt with 59 GB at rest worth of data per day. What I knew would occur is more models would run over the data with each release. I assumed that the models would become more complex over time. They would eventually need to perform calculations overs years worth of data. Hadoop provided a data-centric approach to parallel computing. Using Cascading, a high level pipe/filter library for Hadoop, we could make complex, locally testable models. Using eventing we could plug those models into a self-managing workflow. Adding a new model meant starting a JVM for that model that hooked into the event system and ran Hadoop jobs as needed. If any one model failed, we could rerun it without affecting the rest of the system. This scaled to 60 some odd fraud models that looked over up to 5 years worth of data (5 TB). Some were quick since they only looked at a day's worth of data. Some took several hours. In the end, Hadoop made the entire process easier to handle mentally, testable, and scalable.

bitwize 9y ago

Funnily enough, microcomputers themselves were once the technology solution in search of a problem. The "home computer" fad of the 80s promised lots of applications that didn't quite pan out, including finance, "helping kids with the homework", "the little lady can store her recipes", and home automation. The only ones that really panned out were games (including edutainment), spreadsheets, word processing, and maybe small single-user databases. Anything more required much more sophisticated and expensive equipment, which wouldn't become commonplace till around the 386 era.

le-mark 9y ago
>> the little lady can store her recipes That's a great perspective, and I'm really glad you mentioned this in particular. It's one of those things that was so often repeated, and I always found it to be really bizarre. Recipes? Really? I'd add music synth to your list of real world uses, in some sense that was a killer app for microprocessors.
- syntheticnature 9y ago
  It was probably one of the more obvious examples for a simple non-relational database, neglecting that those early implementations tended to not have any advantages over a card file, and often made things less usable.
- cr0sh 9y ago
  This machine - a 16-bit computer from 1969 (!) - was marketed as a "kitchen computer", among other things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeywell_316 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeywell_316 Seriously.
- bitwize 9y ago
  > I'd add music synth to your list of real world uses, in some sense that was a killer app for microprocessors. You're right. The Altair 8080 famously didn't do anything useful at all upon its release. It wasn't until someone in the Homebrew Computer Club discovered that the radio interference its CPU generated could play tones on an AM radio by buzzing the CPU in loops that a use was found for it.

jesperlang 9y ago

I think the author has an interesting direction but don't quite like the examples.. Taking a step back and looking at it more generally I see this as problem solving vs problem finding (in Alan Kay's words), where a perfect example would be the hype with self driving cars and high speed car tunnels. This is problem solving (traffic jams, car accidents, "I need to get there faster"). Whereas problem finding will ask the bigger questions that will lead to better results. In the question of transportation I think you should set up yourself to the problem "How do we build car free cities?"

virmundi 9y ago
Keep expanding your problem field. How do you create a car free society? I live in Palatka, FL. A small town that's great for tech since housing is low cost and we have reasonably fast Internet to facilitate remote work or cloud based solution development. But to get anything other than food, I have to travel at least 45 minutes to St Augustine unless I purchase online. This means I need a car. For example, I have 12 5/4 cedar boards in my wife's car for storm window frames. I had to drive her Vibe to Jacksonville, which is an hour drive one way. No one around here sells cedar, let alone in 5/4 width. I can't get that delivered. Even if I wanted to, I need to pick the boards since I have aesthetic requirements. How do we solve the small town problem?
- icebraining 9y ago
  Not that I'm actually arguing for eliminating cars from small towns: The solution is public transport; it seems you already have a train that goes to Jacksonville, though it's rather slow; the Brussels-Bruges line is about the same distance and takes only 1h, even with intermediate stops. As for not having delivery, that's solved by the question itself: if people didn't have cars, they would definitively deliver! As for choosing the boards, that's hardly a problem, you go to the shop, choose them and they'd package those specific boards and deliver them. That's fairly common for large items, at least here in Europe, where people (even small town dwellers) tend to have small cars.
  - 9y ago

_lex 9y ago

This article makes a ton of sense for people in smaller companies that aren't worried about rapidly shifting markets and the long time-to-delivery of new functionality that is made possible by technology. He's effectively arguing "why build android when j2me already exists". The problem is that when the iphone comes out, you want something you can quickly retool into a competitive product - otherwise you might get killed by the movement of the market itself. See blackberry & windows mobile for what happens when you're too late to the game. Now, you could argue that it makes more sense to try to make the iPhone instead of a me-too system like android originally was. But most companies aren't apple of 2005, and they know it. They know they aren't really leading in anything - they just don't want to be left in the dust. So they ask their tech teams to investigate stuff that might be transformational, like the blockchain, because if it did create a new green field, they want to have access to the new market and at least near-first mover advantage.

todayispotato 9y ago
I'm afraid you then might have missed my point by a little bit. Let me try and clarify. I think new technologies are awesome. But I think you shouldn't look at a technology and ask "which problems should I solve with this?", but rather at the problems you have and then consider "which technologies should I use to solve this problem?". The last one does mean you have to become good at identifying problems in your company or product offering, which is much harder than finding technologies. But I think that is a very worthwhile goal.

whipoodle 9y ago

Sure, but look a little wider. Most of what goes on is bullshit. Not just tech crap. We're all just trying to make a little money.

todayispotato 9y ago
Yes you're right. But next to making money, a lot of us are also doing our best to do something valuable and worthwhile. It's just an attempt to get people to think in a slightly different direction.

flavio81 9y ago

The author should also mention the following modern techniques used in hype-driven software development: - microservices architecture - using document data stores despite your data being relational

todayispotato 9y ago
I should have really used the latter...

jondubois 9y ago

Hype in tech is terrible. If a technology gets an unusual amount of hype, it's a sign that you should wait a few years before you consider adopting it. Real consensus about a specific technology stack takes at least a couple of years to build up. If a tech product becomes popular very quickly, it is purely because of its superficial qualities - Often at the expense of finer details.

unixhero 9y ago

Interesting quibble.

jaclaz 9y ago

The linked to document is unavailable, but there is a google cache of it: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:bZt3Y3meUJYJ:https://www.stichtsevecht.nl/bestuur/pers_42531/item/onderzoek-innovatieve-technologie-voor-verbeterde-dienstverlening-in-het-sociaal-domein_56332.html%2Bonderzoek-innovatieve-technologie-voor-verbeterde-dienstverlening-in-het-sociaal-domein_56332.html http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:bZt3Y3m... Which is not that bad in Google translate. Essentially: Blockchain when requesting wheelchairs Blockchain is a new technology whose impact is compared to the arrival of the Internet. The Quality Institute of Dutch Municipalities (KING) organizes pilots to investigate what Blockchain technology can mean for municipalities. Stichtse fought with the research question whether Blockchain is useful when requesting a wheelchair. The pilot shows that Blockchain can offer many benefits. For example, the process of requesting issue with Blockchain is faster and more transparent. Residents with Blockchain have more views on the status of their application, as with Track & Trace in a mail package. In addition, the administration around the application becomes a lot easier for all parties. On the original page there is a link to a dedicated site: http://hostedby.frogjump.nl/blockchain-magazine#!/stichtse-vecht http://hostedby.frogjump.nl/blockchain-magazine#!/stichtse-v... where there is a link to an actual .pdf (largely in English): http://cdn.instantmagazine.com/upload/6826/blockchain-stichtsevecht.3d0bc1fbf62d.pdf http://cdn.instantmagazine.com/upload/6826/blockchain-sticht... with a detailed process analysis from which it is clear how the "blockchain" has actually no meaning/usefulness in the whole stuff the "problem" (or "non problem") can seemingly be solved by much more traditional technical approaches (which is the article Author's thesis).