Preparing for the future

Yesterday, we discussed a fundamental characteristic of a platform: it will go places you never imagined.

How do we prepare for this?

There are two ways:

1. Try to predict where things will go in the future and build specific features into your platform now -- just in case ...
2. Build the tooling, processes, and workflows so that you can easily and confidently add functionality when it is needed.

It is obvious which approach works better -- if we try to predict the future (at least the specifics), we are more often wrong.

We can either try to build the future now, or prepare to meet it as it comes.

The line between these two is often difficult to discern.