Let’s cut to the chase, tech is awesome…and it just keeps getting better. The abundance of frameworks, SaaS solutions, open-source software, platforms and applications are overwhelming. Building a new solution today can be a vastly different experience compared to a few years, even a few months, ago depending on your choice of technology.
As an example, to embrace the absurdity of it all, I purchased a new mug ☕️ a couple of months ago, and had to install a firmware update before I could use it. It’s an Ember mug, for those of you who are intrigued, and yes it is well worth it. I cannot explain how satisfying it is getting stuck in a task, picking up your coffee an hour later, bracing for that less than ideal lukewarm sip, and instead, being pleasantly surprised as the coffee hits your tongue at just the right temperature.
With that tangent out of the way 🧐, this wild and expansive playground of tech we all have access to comes with a caveat. It takes time to learn, test and experiment with the technology to determine if it is fit-for-purpose. Then it takes time to implement and integrate into your architectural landscape as you fight to get past roadblocks that your experimentation did not anticipate. Eventually, it takes time to automate parts of it to make it sustainable for day to day operations (so everything right?) and finally it takes time to roll it out productively. This can be a cognitively expensive exercise demanding large amounts of time and effort.
This got us thinking about the keywords “time to”. We could summarize the last paragraph as "it takes time to perceive the value of a new technology introduced into a new or existing stack". The perceived value usually only becomes apparent at that last stage when it is rolled out productively and how long it takes to perceive that value is often the determining factor on whether it will be introduced or not. There are, however, many steps in-between where value may not be perceived by the end-user, but is most definitely felt by the technical & support team.
This sparked the idea for us to begin a "time to…" blog series. The tech team at Kenai is comprised of enthusiasts who love to explore new tech. We have a fail-fast, learn-fast culture and are fortunate to be in a position to be able to test out, develop and roll out cutting edge technologies into our solution as well as leverage them for internal tooling.
Through a series of smaller posts, we are going to explore the time to go from an idea all the way to a minimum viable product, focussed on an internal tooling use-case, but something that could be expanded upon into a client-facing solution.
Some of the domains we are going to be looking at are:
- ⌨️ Time to … Backend
- 🧪 Time to … Test
- 📺 Time to … Frontend
- 🚀 Time to … Ship
In each post we will introduce new technology, discuss how it fits into the “time to” discussion, give some thoughts on our experience and provide you with a tutorial to get you up and running with it in your own time should you want to experience it yourself. We thought about detailing the technologies in this introductory post, but the excitement behind an advent calendar, is not knowing what is behind each door so figured why not adopt that principle. Here is a sneak peek …
This is the plan, and this is us introducing the plan to you. However this is also tech, and not only that, we are going to be exploring tech that is so often referred to as … disruptive. So let’s see where this goes and get excited to experience some new tech.
Also just a little disclaimer up-front. We are not affiliated with any of the service providers or technologies that we will be exploring, we will just be speaking from our experiences so your mileage may vary.
For the next blog in the series, click here