The 7 Deadly Sins of Cargo Culting
How (not) to turn your startup into the next FAANG
Sponsored Link
How iOS apps actually make money
RevenueCat’s State of Subscription Apps report is out, analyzing 115,000+ subscription apps and more than $16B in revenue. Use it to benchmark your pricing, trials, and conversion rates against what’s actually working across the app economy.
The original cargo cult came from World War II; electric boogaloo. Pacific tribes observed cargo planes distributing supplies & food to soldiers. In short order, they began ritualistically copying military practices: marching about, building runways, and talking on fake radios. This imitation was done in the vain hope of summoning more planes, with more supplies.
It’s fun to point and laugh at the silly historical tidbit, until you realise that in tech, we often do the exact same thing.
“Cargo culting” in tech is when we observe and imitate the behaviour of top companies, without understanding the underlying reasoning. You know what I mean: OKRs. Dashboards. SCRUM. Story points.
The behaviour is at its most insidious in the engineering department. You aren’t just cosplaying as a big Silicon Valley swingin’ d*ck, you’re actively kneecapping the productivity of your org, forever.
Distributed Microservices™ is the most famous case study. Popularised by Amazon in the early 2000s (when they had billions in sales and 40m customers). At scale. Desperately imitated by companies (and sold by consultancies) with microscopic sales and nano customers. (Nah, no customers). Even Amazon is seeing the light.
Complexity debt is orders of magnitude worse than tech debt, because you are paying it every time you touch your system.
It’s insidious because engineers love introducing complexity. You need an iron fist to prevent them introducing the latest networking paradigm, shipping a proprietary UI rendering system, or re-architecting the app to RIBs (sorry, Alex Bush).
I’m deeply impressionable, and no stranger to the allure of the cargo cult. When I CTO’d my own startup, I made the decision to roll a serverless stack so we’d scale 2 da moon 🚀, even though a $5 box could trivially handle our meagre DAUs.
Today we’re focusing on mobile engineering, because I have a lot of war stories to draw on. And we’ll cover the full roster of cargo-culting deadly sins:
👑 Pride: Knowing better than Apple about UI frameworks
🤑 Greed: Everything must be available offline
🧨 Wrath: My architecture is bigger than yours
⚙️ Envy: We must adopt Google’s build system
🍆 Lust: Let’s make our networking stack polyamorous
🤤 Gluttony: Om-nom-nom all the modules
⛓️ Sloth: Automate all the things!
👑 Pride
Knowing better than Apple about UI frameworks
Apple gives you UIKit and SwiftUI. One’s performant, and one’s nice to write.
But we want to have our cake and eat it. If we re-write the app in HypeUI, we can get blazing-fast UIKit performance with easy SwiftUI-style syntax! Kind of.
This is fun for side projects, but consider migrating your entire codebase:
Now you have inconsistency between most screens across the codebase, slowing down every context switch.
Invents years of make-work to re-write screens that already work.
Velocity suicide.
This is even worse in the age of AI: perhaps you know the framework inside and out. But the training data is scarce, and your agent will start to hallucinate like it’s 2022.
This is, in my experience, the deadliest sin. I’ve seen it slow feature development to a glacial crawl. If scroll performance is a problem, give UIKit a go. If it’s still a problem, simplify your UI.
This article unlocks for free members next month. Upgrade to learn the other 6 deadly sins now. Plus…
🌟 Access Elite Hacks, my exclusive advanced content
🚀 Read my free articles a month before anyone else
🧵 Master concurrency with my full course and advanced training
If you have a philosophical aversion to subscription pricing, this month I’m offering some of my greatest hits, on the cheap, to keep, in eBook form:
📕 Advanced Swift Concurrency Training is a real-work concurrency simulation, guiding you through 12 increasingly complex challenges, allowing you to apply and master practical concurrency knowledge. You get a certificate at the end. Normally $59. Discounted this month only.
📓 Land Your iOS Tech Job is the novelisation of my epic job grind last year, packed to the gills with practical advice to crush technical interviews and maximise your income. Get it before the market turns and/or the price jumps back to $49.
