I have written about engineering being the practical art of tradeoffs. Here’s a sentence I heard recently when talking about costs (paraphrasing):

It is very good to use <technology X> when we need to query the data during the development.

My caveat was that the sentence was incomplete and should be stated like this:

It is very good to use <technology X> when we need to query the data during the development and it’s worth us spending <a non trivial amount of money annually>"

We cannot just look at the benefits of any technology (or anything else for that matter) without understanding or at least recognizing that there are also costs associated with it. It’s not that I have never seen a pure benefit outcome that say lowers the cost and the complexity and improves performance. But those are rare and are the engineering equivalent of “twenty-dollar bill lying on the sidewalk”.

Last modified on 2025-03-22