Warning: Excessive use of Capitals for Emphasis ahead.

A friend of mine left his job to start a medical startup and has been in the middle of a Fight Over The Tech Stack. The current challenge is very bifurcated...very polarized. It's old vs. new, enterprise vs. startup, closed vs. open source, reliable vs. untested. There doesn't seem to be any middle ground.

Sometimes fights like these start with a Zealot.

Zealot: a person who is fanatical and uncompromising in pursuit of their religious, political, or other ideals.

Not all, don't get mad yet, but sometimes. Sometimes a Technical Religious Zealot is on your team - or runs your team - and they can't make objective decisions about a particular piece of technology.

"Don't use Microsoft, it killed my Pappy! Rails? Please, that won't scale. Node? Maybe if you're 17 that'll work! The only real way to write right software is with Technology X."

The language may not be this overt, but the essence is that Software can only be built This Way.

Here's the thing. Lean in. There's lots of ways to build software. Lots of successful ways. In fact, Success is a great metric.

But there's a lot of crappy Java apps, there's a lot of crappy C# apps, and there's lot of crappy Technology X apps.

Enthusiasm for a technology is understandable, especially if you've had previous success. I've worked in C++, Pascal, node.js, Java, and C#, myself. I've had great success with all of them, but I'm currently most excited about .NET and C#. I'm an enthusiast, to be clear. I've also told people who have hired me for projects that .NET wasn't the right tech for their problem.

Be excited about your technical religion, but also not only respect others' technical religion, celebrate their successes and learn from them as they may inform your own architectures. Every religious can learn from others, and the same is true in software.

Beware the Zealots. Software is a place for measurement, for experience, for research, and for thoughtful and enthusiastic discussion. You or the Zealot may ultimately disagree with the team decision but you should disagree and commit. A good Chief Architect can pull all these diverse architectural conversations and business requirements into a reasonable (and likely hybrid) stack that will serve the company for years to come.

Dear Reader, how do you deal with Technology Decisions that turn into Religious Arguments? Sound off in the comments.

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* Photo "Enthusiasm Rainbow Gel" by Raquel Baranow used under CC BY 2.0

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