Earlier this year, I wrote a blog post for O’Reilly describing my motivations for creating the microservices pattern language. It begins with:

Back in 1986, Fred Brooks, author of The Mythical Man-Month, said that in software engineering, there are no silver bullets. In other words, there are no techniques or technologies that if you adopted would give you a 10X boost in productivity. Yet 30 years later, developers are still arguing passionately about their favorite silver bullets, absolutely convinced that their favorite technology will give them a massive boost in productivity.

This is something to remember next time you listen to a presentation or read an article (especially a manifesto!) that only describes the benefits of a technology.

Every technology has drawbacks and limitations, which are often overlooked by its advocates.

To learn why patterns are a more objective (the benefit) albeit less exciting way (the downside) to describe a technology read the blog post.