4. Use the Right Tools

You may never have heard of Abraham Maslow, but there is a good chance that you know of his “law of the instrument,” otherwise known as Maslow’s hammer. Paraphrased, it goes something like “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” There are at least two important implications of this “law.”

The first is that we all tend to use instruments or tools with which we are familiar in solving the problems before us. If you are a C programmer, you will likely try to solve a problem or implement requirements within C. If you are a DBA, there is a good chance that you’ll think in terms of how to use a database to solve a given problem. If your job is to maintain a third-party ecommerce package, you might try to ...

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