Internal Side Projects

I wrote the below comment in reddit.com/r/programming in response to a medium.com post about Hype Driven Development

There is a solution in my opinion: Internal-Side-Projects.

The only way, for a team to choose/decide in an informed manner, is to do some Internal-Side-Projects using the said framework/stack. Internal-side-projects = something non-critical but useful that everyone can work on, and should work on.

At the minimum, all senior-developers in the team/company should do be indulging in this. If we do this, when the time comes to make a decision, the team will actually have meaningful discussions. Sometimes decisions become obvious when people actually know what they are talking about. (The happy side-effect is that developers remain happy as they get to learn new things.)

However, for this to be practically possible, the company's culture should plan for & encourage such internal-side-projects.

This is absolutely essential for a company/team to remain competitive in the long-run.