Skillful Sailing

Friday 26 February 2016 at 08:00 GMT

It is not the ship so much as the skillful sailing that assures the prosperous voyage.

— George William Curtis

We have a tendency, as technologists, to be distracted by the new shiny thing. Docker is one of those. I think it's a fantastic tool, and I often find myself thinking how useful it might be to containerise the whole world. I try to always remember that it's not a substitute for thoughtful design and engineering, but I don't always succeed.

George William Curtis was right. We create software to provide value. Shiny things, whether they're new web frameworks, new programming languages or new ways to package software, provide no value on their own. They must be skillfully applied. The value of a tool such as Docker is obvious, but that's value to the software developer, not to the end-user.

All the microservices and reactive web toolkits in the world won't save you if your product doesn't solve the right problem.