As Rubyists, we need to discourage artificial attempts to encourage conformance and discourage innovation. Rails shops should find other ways to advertise the quality of their practices without falling back on appeals to the masses, and those in the market for Rails services should do their due dilligence. Measuring the popularity of a practice as a replacement for due diligence is frankly a recipe for failure, and once real investigations have been done, hollow measures of popularity won’t add much.
This post is not about Ruby, or even programming. What caught my attention was the part emphasized above. There is always a fine balance between chaos and order, with chaos leading to anarchy and order leading to a lack of innovation. Too often, especially on the commercial side of the life science industry, we find ourselves bogged down in committee, while on the research side, we see too many people try and do things their own way (format proliferation anyone). What we need to find is that happy middle ground, where change and innovation is encouraged, but as the community agrees on something, we shouldn’t try and just be contrarian just for the same of it. By and large, we’ve done a pretty good job of that, but there can be a tendency to over-engineer data standards, or just keep proliferating new formats. Why does this happen? Quite honestly, I don’t know since people on both ends of the spectrum are usually fairly well meaning. We understand the importance of standards, but usually can’t agree on them, or try and put too much thought into their design and forget that we have some science to do as well.
Perhaps it is the nature of the beast. For every example where the community has arrived at a useable data standard like the PDB, we end up with the wild west (proteomics) or too much committee (MAGE) and bloggers and writers will be writing about this 50 years from now.
Innovation or Committee
Yehuda Katz has an interesting blog post about innovation and best practices. In it he writes (emphasis mine)
This post is not about Ruby, or even programming. What caught my attention was the part emphasized above. There is always a fine balance between chaos and order, with chaos leading to anarchy and order leading to a lack of innovation. Too often, especially on the commercial side of the life science industry, we find ourselves bogged down in committee, while on the research side, we see too many people try and do things their own way (format proliferation anyone). What we need to find is that happy middle ground, where change and innovation is encouraged, but as the community agrees on something, we shouldn’t try and just be contrarian just for the same of it. By and large, we’ve done a pretty good job of that, but there can be a tendency to over-engineer data standards, or just keep proliferating new formats. Why does this happen? Quite honestly, I don’t know since people on both ends of the spectrum are usually fairly well meaning. We understand the importance of standards, but usually can’t agree on them, or try and put too much thought into their design and forget that we have some science to do as well.
Perhaps it is the nature of the beast. For every example where the community has arrived at a useable data standard like the PDB, we end up with the wild west (proteomics) or too much committee (MAGE) and bloggers and writers will be writing about this 50 years from now.