What is a technology radar?

Let’s just jump right in here. A technology radar is a way to provide a high-level view of the maturity of technologies and techniques with the specific goal of measuring their adoptability in production deployments. In this case the definition of “maturity” will need some context. My go-to radar is the Thoughtworks Technology Radar. Thoughtworks is a brilliant organization who has employed and engaged with many thought leaders in the technology industry. You can trust that their radar is well researched and placements are based on experience and data. Another goto radar is the Cloud Native End User Tech Radar.

Why create my own radar?

The reason is simple. I want to have a place to gather and rate technologies in which I have exposure. I run into multiple “new” things every week that come to me from vendors, news articles, pod casts, twitter, github, etc. and if I do not take the time to document the ones that seem interesting (which can be a lot) I will read something and forget about it. This is important because my assessment of assess, trail, adopt is based on the context of my own familiarity with the technology. Something I flag as assess may just be new to me even though it is an established technology that is widely adopted. Last thing to note is the radar is currently sparse as of 2/10/2022. I will keep adding technologies and techniques as I come across them but it is in no way reflective of everything I have been exposed to as I don’t currently have time to make those kinds up dates. Thus it is based on new things to me based on the point in time of 2/10/2022.

How did I create my own?

I used Thoughtworks radar utility to create my own. I store a CSV file in my github and I use these instructions to create the link.