Technologies, tools and practices

A technology is the subject that knowledge hangs off. Every knowledge component in Fito belongs to exactly one, and the list at /knowledge is a list of technologies rather than of components.

This page is for anyone who has seen the tool and practice pills and wants to know what they decide. It covers what a technology holds and why the taxonomy is two-valued. It does not cover the components themselves — for those, see Knowledge components.

A technology is a subject, not a package

Fito does not care whether a technology ships as a library. Javalin is a technology. So is Hexagonal Architecture, and so is Feature Toggles. What makes something a technology in Fito is that people can be competent at it and that the competence can be written down as components.

Each technology carries four things a reader sees:

• A name, such as Hexagonal Architecture.
• A slug, such as hexagonal. The slug is a segment of every component reference on that technology — concept:hexagonal.port — and of its URL.
• A kind, either tool or practice.
• A description, which is optional.

Under every technology sits at least one major line. That is where the version-specific writing goes, and it is why the description above is the version-agnostic one: what the technology is across all its lines.

The kinds are two, on purpose

tool means concrete software — a library, a framework, a command-line program. practice is defined as everything that is not a tool — techniques and methodologies included, rather than sitting beside them as a third and fourth kind.

That sounds lossy, and it is deliberate. Nothing in Fito reads the kind to decide what a reader can do. It is shown on a card and declared when an author creates the technology. A four-value taxonomy would multiply what authors must adjudicate — is TDD a technique or a practice? is Hexagonal Architecture a practice or a methodology? — and no part of the product would consume the answer.

The one place the kind does decide something is which template a component of that technology is written against. A concept about a tool and a concept about a practice ask for different fields.

Note

Reading practice as “not a tool” is the whole of it. A technology labelled practice is not making a claim about being a methodology rather than a technique.

What a technology’s page shows you

Open /knowledge/<technology-slug> and you get, in order:

1. The name, with the kind beside it as a pill.
2. The version-agnostic description, or No description yet. when nobody has written one.
3. Three count pills — Concepts, Usage Scenarios, Execution Facts — each a link that filters the sidebar to that type.
4. A Versions section, one card per major line.
5. A sidebar listing the technology’s components.

The counts are the fastest read of how well a technology is covered. A technology with two concepts and no usage scenarios can teach you what the words mean, and cannot yet put you in a situation that uses them.

Where technologies come from

Nobody at Fito curates a fixed catalogue. A case creator provisions a technology when they need one, and its components are generated from sources that creator ingested. So the list at /knowledge grows sideways, in the shape of what people have actually taught.

That is also why a technology can sit there with a thin description and two components. It is a real subject somebody started, not a stub Fito shipped.

What’s next

• Browse the knowledge area — find a technology, and read one.
• Knowledge components — the three types that hang off a technology.