Easter is a time of new beginnings. Consider the iconography of this time of year, eggs, bunnies, chicks, lambs, etc. Chief among these symbols is the Easter Egg. In the 1800’s the jeweller Peter Carl Fabergé was commissioned to develop a beautiful easter gift for Empress Maria Feodorovna by Tsar Alexander III. Peter created the famous Imperial Hen Egg.
Which, when opened revealed an ornate gold hen set with ruby eyes. This stunning piece became the first of 52 “Imperial Eggs” to be commissioned by the Russian Royal Family. Each one created as a unique easter gift for someone special within the household. Solidifying the House of Fabergé as one of the greatest jewellery firms in history and establishing Peter Carl Fabergé as one of the finest craftsmen in the world.
Of Jewellers and IT professionals
IT Professionals share a lot of characteristics with Jewellery makers; a love of subject, deep seated desire to please our customers, a need to try new materials, approaches, and a strong urge to create something fascinating and genuinely unique. Thereby showcasing our skill and, as with Peter, securing our future.
Having spent decades in the IT Industry, designing Data and Analytics solutions for a multitude of diverse clients, I often find myself thinking: “I’ve seen this pattern of requirements before!”. Try as I might, I can’t recall a single occasion where a client’s needs were so unique as to merit discarding all best practice approaches.
There are always wrinkles, like unusual legacy data sources, fiendishly clever business logic or regulatory restrictions; and that doesn’t mean I’m not acutely aware of the risk of forcing a pattern onto something that just isn’t there. The adage “To a man who only has a hammer, every problem looks like a nail” follows hot on the heels of any dogmatic thoughts.
Frankly, the main reason for the diversity in approach within the IT industry is less to do with the variety of requirements/technologies and more to do with the preferences of those charged with addressing them. IT people’s skillsets are born out of two things; experience and an urge to learn the latest shiny thing. How many times have you heard, “we need to do it this way because it’s the only way we know how” try asking an old style DBA to implement a Data Lake.
Go on…
This seems to indicate something of a paradox, a simultaneous urge to repeat old approaches coupled with a need to try the latest thing. Here’s the rub, the latest toy doesn’t challenge the status of an expert. It’s too new, there’s no canon of knowledge to be caught out on. There is nothing to lose, with the status as expert being protected. So it’s either bleeding edge or trailing
edge. Which is a shame really, what’s wrong with just learning current best practise?
All of which is fine except when it’s time to do something new. We’ve all got horror stories of weirdly designed systems with unique approaches. I’ve seen a Data Warehouse developed using Micro-Services, individually written complex transformations created with Mapping Data Flows, entire ETL’s written with PowerBI Dataflows, laissez faire approaches to BI platform management, C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. Sorry, getting a bit carried away there. (Bladerunner Movie Reference if you’re interested.)
An interesting pattern within these exciting approaches is that they have all generally been implemented by extraordinarily smart and talented people. Who, if they had been given an architecture rather than a blank sheet of paper would, in all likelihood, have developed an excellent solution.
Sadly, the parting gift of these savants is generally to leave the organisation, and the remaining lesser mortals, with a solution so complex as to defy understanding or maintenance. Generally needing the recruitment of two or three experts in order to effect some sort of repair. Imagine having to repair or enhance a Fabergé Egg.
What is he getting at you might ask. My goal with this blog is make a case for standard patterns and why we should need a very good reason to diverge from them. From my point of view, while the Faberge Egg is a wonderful creation, we should not seek to create such unique things for our clients. Unless, of course, they are a “Dowager Empress”…