Based on my professional experience, I have learned to divide people into two distinctive groups:
Formalist: People who take a map, analyze the available routes, check where these end, and then decide their final destination.
Misfits: People who see the field and decide where to go then take a map and draw a straight line from their current location to the place they want to go. If some already established route leads there efficiently as they dream, they will use it, but if not, they will carve through a mountain to reach there if necessary.
Most people are part of the Formalists group. They are secure there. There are great people in this group with significant experience doing fantastic work and helping each other. This group creates policies and guidelines, and this is the place where “industry standards” flourish. This group has the PhDs who “know better” and the administrators who have to “stick to the budget.”
But the Missfits can’t stop dreaming out of the box. When the Missfits try to move toward shaking “the box,” the Formalist will get stressed and pushback, and many times, they will ridicule the Missfits as the ones trying to do “crazy stuff” and trying unnecessarily to “reinvent the wheel.” This situation usually dissuades the Missfits from moving forward with their plans to keep “peace” with the Formalists, who typically hold the majority.
However, occasionally, the conditions become favorable for the Misfits. They find themselves in a field with little or no Formalist opposition! Under these unique conditions, tremendous technological advances are made—the same conditions that led to the creation of the technology that Formalists are conformable with now and do not want to move.
Most of the technology we use today was in the hands of a Misfit at some point, A Misfit in the right conditions or “naive enough” to push hard against the Formalist’s barrier. Misfit stories are fantastic, and a recent one was published by Hivekid.
How we’ve saved 98% in cloud costs by writing our own database
“What is the first rule of programming? Maybe something like ‘do not repeat yourself’ or ‘if it works, don’t touch it’? Or, how about ‘do not write your own database!’… That’s a good one.
Databases are a nightmare to write, from Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability (ACID) requirements to sharding to fault recovery to administration – everything is hard beyond belief.
Fortunately, there are amazing databases out there that have been polished over decades and don’t cost a cent. So why on earth would we be foolish enough to write one from scratch?”
Yes, they did the unthinkable “sin”; they created a database from scratch. They “reinvented the wheel!” And it is a better “wheel” that has triggered a lot of criticism, many of which are summarized as “how dare you…”
But this story is not attractive to Formalists; some are already screaming at it. This story celebrates creativity, proudly breaking the status quo and doing something better. This story is undoubtedly targeted to:
“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.” Steve Jobs.
Now, go and reinvent the wheel, I dare you!
Copyright Italo Osorio 2024