When the Derecho hit Iowa and large parts of my area were without power for over a week we got to discover just how many of our very large enterprise processes were dependent to some degree on "toy" apps built in "toy" technologies running on PCs under people's desks. Some of it clever but all of it fragile. It's easy to be a strong technical person and scoff at their efforts. Look how easily it failed! But it also ran for years with so few issues it never rose to IT's attention before a major event literally took the entire regional company offices offline. It caused us some pain as we had to relocate PCs to buildings with sufficient backup power. But overall the effort was far smaller than building all of those apps with the "proper" tools and processes in the first place.
Large companies can be a red tape nightmare for getting anything built. The process overload will kill simple non-strategic initiatives. I can understand and appreciate less technical people who grab whatever tool they can to solve their own problems when they run into blockers like that. Even if they don't solve it in the best way possible according to experts in the field. That feels like the hacker spirit to me.
Please don’t stop at building “toy” prototypes, it’s a great start, but take some time to iterate, rebuild, bring it to production standards, make it resilient and scalable.
You’d be surprised how little effort it is compared to having to deal a massive outage. E.g. You did eventually had to think about backup power.
Large companies can be a red tape nightmare for getting anything built. The process overload will kill simple non-strategic initiatives. I can understand and appreciate less technical people who grab whatever tool they can to solve their own problems when they run into blockers like that. Even if they don't solve it in the best way possible according to experts in the field. That feels like the hacker spirit to me.