You are sitting in a conference or meetup presentation about that hot new technology. Everybody around you seems so excited and engaged, but it's twenty minutes into the talk and you can barely keep your eyes open. This stuff is either way over your head or just plain boring. That wouldn't be such a problem except that your mind starts racing.

"Why is this stuff so easy for everyone else, but I'm having so much trouble?"

45 minutes in and the material still seems like its being spoken in a different language. Come time for the Q&A and other attendees are talking about this stuff like it's an established part of best practices.

You go home and try to find some blog posts or YouTube videos and it still seems weird and impossible. You feel some nervous shame and a lot imposter syndrome. Eventually you kind of move on from this topic and life goes on. You still know how to code. You know how to code pretty well.

Let's rewind.

Back to the original scenario. Maybe you're sitting in that conference talk and you do understand what's being discussed on stage, but you're at a loss as to why anyone would want to take that approach. Couldn't they just do this a whole different way?

Four Months later

But then you face a challenge at work. You investigate your options and this idea keeps coming up. It's the same idea people were talking about back in the spring. But this time it makes sense. Somehow. The words in the graphs are now familiar and clear.

The rhetoric is finally starting to make sense because now you understand the context. You have a problem to solve and the insight to take the next step with this hot new technology everyone is talking about.

It's amazing how a bit of insight into the problem is just what you need to understand the solution. It is really hard to go from step zero to step five in technology adoption. The people closest to the pain are the ones at the edge of their seats in the conference talk.

When you need the solution, you'll understand this stuff way better. When you're just trying to keep up, you might get it, but you might also struggle. You might also sit back and think "why would anyone need this" until you really need it.

Necessity is the mother of adoption. If you don't have a burning need to adopt a new practice or technology, it probably is not going to happen. React did not take off because of buzz. It took off because people were extremely frustrated by state management on the client, whether they really knew it or not. Serverless, NoSQL, and lots of other technologies seem silly on some level to many, but they came around because of real need. Some developments were misguided, but if you're sitting back clueless to the problem, the solution is not going to make much sense either.

P.S.

Some people went along with that conference talk just to fit in. It's unclear whether they ever understood the problem. They probably bought into the buzzwords. Now that you're a convert, you're just as skeptical ever about this segment of adopters. That's pretty understandable.