You know that story, “Thomas the Little Engine That Could”? Yeah, that one. It kinda popped into my head the other day ’cause of something that went down at work. It’s funny how those old kid stories sometimes nail real life, you know?
So, we had this big ol’ data job that needed doing. Huge. And of course, everyone started talking fancy. “We need a new distributed processing framework!” “Let’s get a cloud-native solution with AI-powered analytics!” You could almost hear the cash registers ringing. Lots of talk, lots of meetings, PowerPoints flying everywhere. The usual song and dance when folks want to look like they’re doing something groundbreaking.
And I remembered this little script I’d patched together years ago. Thing was ancient, written in some language nobody uses much anymore. Just a simple thing, really, designed for a much smaller task back in the day. It was just sitting there, gathering digital dust. I figured, what the heck, lemme take a peek at it.
When I suggested we could maybe, just maybe, try and adapt my old script, you should’ve seen the faces. Like I’d suggested using a hamster wheel to power the whole office. “That relic? No way it can handle this volume!” “It’s not scalable!” “It’s not best practice!” Heard all of that. But nobody had a better idea that didn’t involve a six-month procurement process and a budget bigger than my mortgage.
So, I just went ahead and started tinkering with it. Man, it was a slog at first. The thing creaked and groaned. It needed a lot of coaxing, a bit of new oil in its gears, so to speak. I had to rewrite chunks of it, optimize some loops that were probably fine for a hundred records but not for millions. Late nights, lots of coffee. My screen looked like a mess of debug messages for a good week. My boss kept walking by, giving me that look, you know, the one that says “I told you so” before you’ve even properly failed.
It really reminded me of this one place I worked at, years back. They brought in this super expensive, all-singing, all-dancing enterprise software. Cost a fortune. Consultants swarming everywhere, talking jargon nobody understood. They promised it would solve all our problems, cure world hunger, the lot. First day it went live? The entire system fell over. Took them three days to even get it to boot up again, and even then, it was slower than molasses in January. And the simple spreadsheet system it replaced? Had been working just fine for years, but it wasn’t “strategic.” Yeah, right.
Anyway, back to my little script. I kept at it. And slowly, steadily, it started to chug along. It wasn’t flashy. It didn’t have a fancy dashboard. But it was processing the data. Chunk by chunk. Little by little. Like that train huffing and puffing up the hill.
And then, one morning, I came in, and it was done. The whole damn job. Finished. My “relic” had done what all the fancy talk couldn’t. The silence from the “we need a new framework” crowd was pretty satisfying, I gotta say.
So yeah, sometimes those little engines, the ones nobody believes in, they can really surprise you. People are always chasing the next shiny thing, forgetting that sometimes the simple, reliable tools, the ones that just quietly do their job, are the ones that actually get you where you need to go. It’s not always about having the biggest or the newest; sometimes it’s just about having the one that says “I think I can.”
