We work in the context of a very young industry and that fact is oft forgotten by the that many of us have worked in it for decades.

The materials, standards, frameworks, data, capabilities are all moving forward at a tremendous rate and our period of flux is a natural response to that environment. We are in the midst of a confluence of 'Revolutions': the ones most affecting our industry are Materials and Information (I see the 'Social' revolution as a derivative of the Information revolution).

We'll have to wait for those Revolutions to subside or for regulatory bodies to get teeth (meaning people have to die) before we have any realistic expectation of comprehensive quality control and truly robust and reliable commodity systems. There are great examples of artisans doing incredible work in our field and adhering to quality self-imposed standards. But in reality, the capabilities of the artisan are incredibly potent given the power of our computing systems and the publishing capabilities of the Internet so we have many more examples of well intentioned but immature solutions published and put in place.

You wouldn't buy your house at a craft fair, but many companies buy their line-of-business software in a similar fashion, from a well meaning small company who rely on frameworks for power but may not understand the full responsibility of production software.

We will get to the maturity of the construction industry at some point (we model many of our industry roles on theirs...) and our architects and engineers will have a stable set of materials, regulations and standards to rely on such that our end product will be capable of standing 100 stories tall and safely housing the digital assets of people who rely on it for their finances, health... and will within reason be able to withstand the naturally foreseen hazards (fire, flood, decay, malicious access...)

But right now, our architects are bombarded by new materials that provide quantum elevations in capabilities, our engineers are constantly under pressure to adapt to new frameworks and languages as the underlying platforms increase performance levels by orders of magnitude and our programmers are able to build reasonable and highly functional solutions that carry out the line-of-business requirements for the most part; so they do.

So let's not despair too much about our predicament, it will be boring soon enough and we'll be slogging along hammering nails into 2x4s according to pattern on 16" centres with well understood load thresholds and tensile strengths. Let's revel in the chaos and do our best to provide robust systems with full consideration for security, standards, auditing, logging, data integrity, performance, scalability, maintainability, user experience and whatever other system aspect you deem significant. Our industry is a teenager, raging with hormones, indestructible, capable of everything, let's embrace that for the time being -the mortgage and kids are coming soon enough.

We live in interesting times...

Cheers,

Derek.