Bad things happen when we don't repeat the obvious.

It's 9pm and I'm writing a post for the company engineering blog. Every sentence is a slog. Not because I'm exacting and conciseness isn't my strong suit. My writing is slow because every word is obvious, almost patronizing.

Obvious realities bear repetition, and so must you. Common sense is not so common. The majority of ideas floating around try too hard. They're designed to confuse, seduce, and sell. Press releases and ads push to the forefront, while reviewed articles and texts sit on shelves and in queues.

Repeat the obvious, so we stay on the same page. The ways we rush people into technology leaves little time for foundations. Software is so new and developers so in-demand, every wave brings more fresh minds than the last. Developers are arriving faster than knowledge can diffuse.

Repeat the obvious, to keep perspective. Technology may favor the new, but fundamentals do exist. Without reminders, time buries working technologies in the dust of silence.

Repeat the obvious, to avoid bizarre dark ages. Take functional programming's disappearance in the 1990s/2000s, cast aside in favor of object orientated hype. Or that one time when not enough programmers talked about and taught event-driven servers programming and Frankenstein was cast as revolutionary.

So I hope you'll forgive the repetition. It hurts me more than it hurts you, and believe me when I say it helps many. Documentation does not equal disussion. The modern media landscape demands a technology have both docs and discourse to remain useful.

Until we live in a world where reference rules over repetition, you can help by writing about something painfully obvious to you. Bad things happen when we don't repeat the obvious.