02 The Inevitable

Let’s talk about Binaries. Neither the zero and ones our mind instantly thinks of, nor the files we’ve compiled some time ago. We’re about to talk about perspectives and views. How they affect our behavior, our engineering and our engineering culture. We'll be trying to make something beneficial out of our binary thinking minds.

In several eastern philosophies exists the practice of giving in to “truths” and practicing to be encouraged to action by doing so. To live in between giving up to despair and to being in denial of them. Which is the continuation of where we left off in the previous chapter, on what constitutes non-beneficial actions. Using the practice and methodology of giving in, we’d try to define, extend and systemize The Beneficial Way Framework.

At the end of the previous chapter we spoke of erosion, a process that would cause a demise or decay when left unattended or incorrectly attended. Lack of awareness of these processes leads to unrealistic expectations or unattainable values. We argued that awareness of these processes would lead us to avoid non-beneficial actions, in advance. Which is exactly the goal of The Beneficial Way Framework. If we could define similar erosive processes to software engineering and application development, we’d have a rule of thumb on how to identify non-beneficial actions. Luckily, we already did so.

After a long journey we managed to define what Eventualism is in the previous chapter. I find that thinking in terms of “it will eventually happen” is also beneficial while designing. Saying it pushes us away from the non-beneficial action of doing nothing, causes us to stop disregarding the situation at hand and give it a serious thought. The outcome would be a process of discovery which can lead to better and more robust designs. It would help us better grasp what we should actually do now, what should be done later and what should not be done because a good enough reason does not yet exist.

Applications outlive their developers. Let’s talk about this fact, on how personal issues and personnel should affect our decision making and designs. As people are a delicate matter and should not be either disregarded or blamed, let’s try to see it through Eventualism.