The Speed of Small Solutions

The pace of technology change requires nimble solution change. Small solutions help.

All-in-one is Expensive

How many times do you setup a project? Once. But how many times does tech change over the lifetime of your project? Many, many times.

There is an allure to all-in-one solutions: everything has been preconceived; it's all bundled in the box together; it just works. Once you pay the price of learning the whole package, they say, you'll have a complete toolkit to solve your problems. But this upfront cost is hardly the final price to pay.

Moving away from an all-in-one solution is even more expensive than choosing it in the first place. Because it came as a package, it often has to leave as a package.

One-upping Technology

There is so much movement in so many technology spaces. Subjects are ever-deepening. There are many players in these spaces, developing new techs every day. Each new tech seems to leap frog the previous and expand into new, interesting territory.

When something comes out that is compelling enough to make us want to use it, we'd love to add it to our development arsenal. We can keep with important trends individually, not waiting for a convenient all-in-one's to appear.

Pieced-together Solutions

If we have pieced our own favorite techs together into a solution that works for us, we're more ready to swap something out when the new, compelling tech comes along. We don't have to throw away the rest. We can use them together.

Each of these small solutions can do one thing well. They can have well-defined single responsibilities that can be learned, optimized, debugged, or swapped out easily. This means as things change, we can advance our own solutions faster, approaching the pace of the source technology change.

If we are more nimble in advancing our solutions, we can improve more quickly. We can give more joy to our customers. We can give more joy to the developers. The a la carte approach to our solution choices enables us to pick up and put down solutions as they become available.

Have you experienced this before? What small solutions have you found easy to move away from or advance into?