New Year's resolutions and all that get me thinking about "conventional wisdom" in software engineering and why I have a despair.com poster on my office wall as inspiration. True, despair.com Demotivators™ are supposed to be spoofs of motivational posters but in one or two cases, they fail at that and become actually motivational. In this case:
As an engineer, I always want to improve on what I've done before so when I ask about a design or algorithm or process and the answer is "that's the way we do it" I used to have to bite my tongue. Now I just point to my poster and say "yeah, so what?" and then "tell me why". There could be a good reason that we do it that way; or it might be that we don't have a good reason.
For example, at one point we were doing our deploys late at night. Conventional wisdom was that we needed to do this to keep the site up and our customers happy. With a little thinking about headroom and migrations, and a switch to rolling restarts, we changed our deploys to the daylight hours, freeing our engineers and ops folks to spend more time with their families.
My job - our job - is to constantly improve what we do and that means questioning everything. Don't accept "we've always done it that way". Grab the New Year and start making things better!