Examples

Bad consensus

• A majority can agree and still be wrong
• Checked exceptions, unpopular because of a blog post
  • Now the compiler can tell you what params your function takes and what it returns, but not how it can fail
• Markdown, popular despite having significant trailing whitespace
  • It happened to exist at the right time
• Continuous integration builds that can't be reproduced locally, or on anything other than one specific CI service or imperfect clone
  • Jenkinsfile, github actions
• Procurement based on a tool getting you up and running in 5 minutes, when that's a negligible part of the total cost of the project even if it's 2 weeks
  • Also see Monorepo
• Logging turned down to a trickle, which makes incidents near impossible to investigate

Triumphs of marketing

• Create or exaggerate a problem, solve it just well enough to ensure vendor lock-in, collect support money
• IntelliJ IDEA, which claims to beat Eclipse
  • In some ways it does, thus developers never see the benefits of Eclipse's remarkable built-in compiler
• Gradle, which claims to be a better Maven
  • In practice it solves none of Maven's problems while creating some of its own
  • Groovy in general, which claims to be a Pythonic Java but does not come across as Pythonic
• Helm, a glorified templating tool that fails to be DRY for trivial tasks and gets in the way when you try to do something non-trivial
  • state can get out of sync with reality, causing deployments to appear to succeed while reality still out of sync with codebase
  • diff plugin easily confused by duplicate templates
• Terraform has the right idea of being declarative but is otherwise unsophisticated
  • hacks needed to work around one plan and apply per config