Given the rapid growth of the internet as an information resource… and our seemingly inherent human treatment of the written word as gospel… it is very easy for my fellow engineers to read a single blog entry and conclude that ‘we should be doing that!’

… and I think that’s a very serious problem.

To make matters worse, the ever increasing number of tools and frameworks leads to a dangerous tendency to reduce our engineering responsibility to ‘toolbox assembly’.  We’ll use Tool A for this and Tool B for that and we’ll house that all in Framework C… my work is done here!

I remember sitting in a meeting a few years ago and asking “when did we get so afraid to write our own code?”

Ultimately, I’m interested in ideas… using tools and contemplating thoughts from internet blogs are useful endeavors… but they shouldn’t replace our basic creative function as engineers.

Give me innovation not regurgitation!