📊 Past performance ...

"past performance is not indicative of future results"

The above phrase is a disclaimer we often see associated with investments.

However, this applies to more than investments ...

• A technology that was cutting edge in the past may not be the best option for the future (example building web applications in PHP vs Go).
• People who did good work in the past usually continue to do good work, but not always. (people can lose interest, suffer burnout, have personal problems, etc.)
• Workflows used in the past are not always the best option for the future (example, requiring patches on mail-lists will probably alienate a significant portion of the developer population who were raised on pull-requests).
• As the level of integration in integrated circuits continues, the IC we used in the past may not be the best solution compared to more integrated solutions available in the future.

How we proceed in the future needs to be a combination of what we learned in the past (experience) and the technology available in the future (vision). Again, dysfunction arises when we mix these two modes up.