My personal productivity cycle is tied to this industry hype cycle. My schoolfriend back in 2003 was my personal “technology trigger.” From him, I rapidly learned some standard tools from Gartner’s plateau of productivity: PHP, MySQL, Apache. Then I surveyed the plateau more widely, finding Python, Postgres, and Nginx. A little further away, I had heard of Gartner’s trough of disillusionment. I sneered at the Perl, Java, CORBA. I’ll keep my Python, thanks. — The hacker hype cycle