In a new post from the QaFoo blog they talk about a developer's life as a trade-off, the amount of work to put into one technology or approach before deciding it's not worth the trouble and moving on.

At Qafoo, we train a lot of people on topics like object oriented software design, automated testing and more. [...] There is no silver bullet and one of the most important skills every developer needs to hone is to assess possibilities and to find the best trade-off for the current challenge.

He uses personal experience to illustrate the point, a struggle they had with choosing a storage system for their application's data. While one technology seemed to be an ideal fit (Cassandra) the trouble it caused made them fall back to something more reliable. He also talks about another instance where he had to make a decision around using a state machine...or not, because of the overhead and time consumed around it.

One of the most important tasks of a developer is to make trade-offs. They occur wherever you look in your every day life. It is a highly important step to realize and accept this. And it is important to hone that skill. You need to open your mind for new technology and techniques, learn and try them wherever you can. But then you need to step back, analyze the current situation and then find the best trade-off between all possible approaches.