Software Development

Watch: Avoiding orchestration pitfalls when developing custom dev solutions

Prefect CTO Chris White breaks down how developers can get caught up in tech debt when trying to create customized systems.

Tip tap typing away. (Video by YouTube user Tanuri X, gif by Paige Gross)

When it comes to the flexibility of development, it can be tempting to make a custom solution for everything. But how do can you avoid getting caught up in the workload that comes with it?

As part of the Technical.ly Developers Conference at Philly Tech Week 2021 presented by Comcast, CTO of D.C.-based Prefect Chris White spoke about this problem, and the detriment it can put on individuals. Referencing the children’s book “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie,” White spoke about how for developers and data engineers, orchestration is a set of problems that starts off simple but ends with anything but.

“So you do the simple thing, you implement something custom, and then very quickly what you find out is that you’ve developed a system that has such sprawling emergent complexity that you just have a ton of tech debt to manage and you find yourself prioritizing the wrong thing instead of the task that you’re actually hired to complete,” White said, offering a real work example to support his point.

Watch the full session, slides included, here:

Companies: Prefect

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