It's 10 pm and I just remembered that I must write this week’s post. Shit.

Today I will write about something I call an early adopter profile. That's basically a personality trait that some people have or developed. These people tend to try new things based on one single and powerful argument: why not?

Why not?

The number of benefits that people like this get from just being open to trying new stuff without needing a lot to be convinced is ridiculous. I don't have a clear answer about the origins of this personality trait (will study more in the future), but I believe this is influenced by your childhood, how you were raised, how strict your parents were, and other aspects like that.

I think I'm one of them. One of the things that I like the most is to just try new shit. New software, new gadgets, new food, new people… really anything. The biggest examples I can think of right now are related to software, so that's how I'm going to illustrate my idea.

As I said, I love to try new apps. So, I found out about a software called OrbStack. It's (being extremely simplistic) a Docker wrapper for Mac, so we no longer need to use Docker Desktop - which consumes a lot of resources - to have a better visualization of what's going on with our containers. I tried it out and thought it was very cool. That was on Sunday. Monday morning, when I arrived at work, I told one of my coworkers (who also uses Mac) about it and his instant answer was something like: “Yeah, that's not going to last (he always says that about new pieces of software), also why would I switch from Docker Desktop, it works perfectly fine for me”.

This made me think about how different our points of view were about trying new products. If someone told me about something they really liked and that could help me I would love to try it, even if I knew nothing about it. Sometimes, I try new apps even if I don't need them, just for the sake of doing so.

In some way, this adds to what I talked about in Technological Bias. A lot of people on the internet are reluctant about new JS frameworks. They say that they don't have the necessary robustness and will probably die soon. Some of them really do. But some of them don't. The aftermath is either you never try new frameworks and just watch some die and others become popular or you try it and 1. it dies and you “””lost””” some time learning it or 2. it becomes popular and now you have a whole new world to explore! Maybe you can look for job opportunities that require knowledge about this framework or you can be one of the first to create some social media content about it.

Do you see how the possible upside is way bigger than the possible downside?

Being close to fresh stuff is great.

Just try new things. Sometimes it's not worth it and that's the price of trying new things recurrently. If you tried and didn't like it, the price to pay will be likely insignificant. Remember that you can just uninstall the app, leave the restaurant, end the relationship… idk. No big damages are caused when you just experience something new and don't like it.

On the other hand, if it's worth it (and a lot of times it is), you just won big. Enjoy.