It's better to experiment than to be "experienced"

This is something I picked up from a Twitter post — the type of annoying listicle you'd probably pass on without looking.

I see experienced people as individuals who spend all day pontificating.

"This is how it should be done."

"This is how I did it 20 years ago and it worked."

When you become the village wise, you also become one of the limiting factors on vision. It is tempting to get high on your own experience and completely miss the context and changes in data.

One of the things I do, when I find myself becoming too religious with people about the things I know is to try to prove myself wrong by running a short experiment.

Do I know that lazy loaded above-the-fold images negatively impact Largest Contentful Paint(LCP)? Why not lazy load an above-the-fold image and prove myself wrong? Run a performance audit for each scenario and analyse the results.

Was I wrong? Thank God for not putting a whole development team through hell to implement stuff because of my "experience".

Was I right? Lucky guess. The same thing might not be true 6 months from now.

I'm on Twitter, btw!