Have Informed Opinions

I don’t want this to turn into a rant, but…

Please, have informed opinions.

Whether we’re talking about world view, politics or tech, it’s important to be informed. The one key to this is to try it first before you have an opinion.

Just a few reminders:

PHPUnit is dumb, I want Codeception. Have you used PHPUnit before? Also, how long ago? Did you keep up with the changes? How is your choice of Codeception informed? I’m not saying one tool is better than the other, but make sure you’re making judgements based on current, informed information. Don’t say PHPUnit sucks if you haven’t built out a current project in it. Don’t show distain towards Codeception if you’ve never introduced it fully.

Laravel framework is slow, give me Symfony Are you sure you’re not practicing premature optimization? What does “slow” mean? Are you faster programming Laravel vs Symfony? This is for any framework, or toolset, basically. What measurements are you using? Are you measuring the right thing? (Business goals vs technical performance) Have you used both extensively? Did you just get your opinion from a “trusted” person’s tweet? Did you configure everything properly?

IDEs are dumb, Vim 4 life! Its fine to have a tool that you’re efficient at. I’ve seen some great vim typist that are very admirable. But, that doesn’t mean that an IDE is bad. First, do you have all of the functionality in vim as you do in this IDE? Did the IDE come configured but you have to install tons of plugins for your desired tool? Is everyone using your tool on your team? Can you combine the functionalities? Also, if you’re stuck with a toolset, are you making sure you’re moving forward (a generalization is that vim users tend to work on the servers outside of the CI/CD devops loop).

Be informed with your opinions, please. It’s ok to have opinions, but make sure you can back them up. Otherwise, be quiet, learn from others, and you’ll get further ahead.

Yup, it did turn into a rant I think…