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Conventional wisdom in software development is to avoid overengineering things. The YAGNI principle (You Ain't Gonna Need It) speaks to that, as do dozens of articles and blogs and conference talks from Big Name developers.

What is less often discussed, though, is the cost of under-engineering. A cost I recently paid rather severely.

Earlier this week, Seifeddine Gmati, aka "azjezz," posted an RFC for PHP generics. It's the most robust and promising approach for that feature to come along to date, and it's generating a lot of buzz. The folks at ThePHP.cc asked me to blog about it so they had something to reference in their new PHPReads newsletter, so, here it is. :-)

This will be a bit more ranty than my usual articles. Fair warning. But I need to put this out there.

Recently, a video by Jeffrey Way of Tailwind/Laracast fame came across my feed. In less than 15 minutes, he managed to succinctly capture everything I absolutely detest about the current moment in the IT industry.

The Internet has been angry lately about Things in Tech, as the Internet usually is. And inevitably there have been the people saying "can't we just focus on code without the politics?" Which, while an understandable desire (and one I agree with), is simply impractical. What's especially telling, though, are the people who specifically name-drop FOSS (Free/Open Source Software) as something that is a-political and should be kept that way.

That... demonstrates a complete and total lack of awareness of Free Software itself. I assume in most cases that it's honest ignorance, so I will try to briefly explain why that is not the case. (Feel free to point people to this article in the future the next time they start down that line of thinking; just be nice about it.)

Learning is important. I trust that is a non-controversial statement.

Much has been said about learning styles, and I will not repeat it here. However, something I see less talked about is learning phases. Specifically, I want to talk about two distinct phases of learning: Up and Out.

While learning usually is applied to a skill, the concept I'm talking about applies to anything: Learning a new skill, getting accustomed to a new community, or culture, or country, or tradition, or religion, or practice, or... pretty much anything.