Need help in sorting the programming buzz-words

Question

How do you sort out the good buzz from the bad buzz? - I really need your help here :)

I see a lot of buzz-words nowadays, both here on SO and in school. For example, we had a teacher who everyone respected, who said "be careful about gold-plating and death-by-interfacing". Now, everyone and their mama cries whenever I'm creating an interface..

Another example would be here on SO where lately "premature optimization is the root of all evil", so everytime someone asks a perfomance question, he'll get that sentence thrown in his face. A few months ago I remember it was all about NHibernate in here, etc., etc...

These things comes and goes, but only the good buzz stays. Now, how do you seperate the good from the bad? By reading blogs from respected persons? By trying to come to a conclusion on your own, and then try to convince others that you're right? By simply ignoring it?

Answer 1

Most buzz revolves around a reasonably good idea. It's rare that something hyped doesn't include a good idea that'd be worth knowing. At the same time, there's the tendency to want silver bullets.

Ultimately there's no substitute for

• trusting your own common sense as to the worth of said buzz. It's important to recognize that you have expertise as well, and your own opinion is not worthless. Some "experts" are just opinionated people who are louder.
• humility in the face of the knowledge that lots of people who're doing this are smarter than you are and if your common sense tells you they're full of it you may very well be missing the point.

Of course it doesn't help that these two statements are mutually contradictory. Now if we could only find the right buzzword to tell us which to apply in any given situation...