Is this about BoringSSL or The Boring Company? There's so many new and exciting boring technologies to follow that it's hard to keep track.
Choose Boring Technology
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Re: Choose Boring Technology
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." ― George Santayana "I've got news for Mr. Santayana: we're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive." ― Kurt Vonnegut
There's even an expression for it: reinventing the wheel.
No, reinventing the wheel is alright; at best you may find a new and better kind of wheel, at worst you'll still learn something. This is forgetting that wheels can be round.
Re: Choose Boring Technology
#23There's a longer term issue that appears to be missing here. At what point do you change? There must be a point otherwise we'd all be here writing COBOL/CICS with some whizzy Javascript interface library. Over time it becomes harder and harder and more and more expensive to maintain old technology. Because frankly maintaining old technology is pretty boring and career destroying so you need to be paid more and more t…
I'll contradict everyone here: You figure it out on a case-by-case basis.
Generally, risks go down over time and with broad use. SQL, as a technology, is 100% risk-free, having been around forever, and widely used. COBOL is high risk, since while it's been around forever, hardly anyone uses it anymore, at least on modern projects. Moving your Cobol app to Android is fraught with unknown-unknown risk. Something that's been around 2-3 years is generally much lower risk than something which came out last year, and a good 10 years drives risks down further most of the time, but not always. It depend on whether people seem happy with it. Mongo seemed like a really good idea first few years, until people figured out (1) it had wonky performance issues (2) it was really hard to query for some type of queries (3) and what was the problem with postgresql again (it seems to do JSON pretty well too!)? Things change too. Java was the bedrock, stable, safe choice. It wasn't the fastest to code in, it was a bit clunky, but it was THE safe choice, and enterprises flocked to it. That is until Sun died, Oracle happened, and litigation+monetization kicked up to try to treat Java as a cash cow.
The flip side is why would you use it? When I was building an app a while back, I chose React although React Native had just come out at that point. It let me build the app once, and run on web, Android, and iOS, instead of 3 times. I figured cost savings of building and maintaining one codebase outweighed the risks. On the other hand, in most cases, the upsides of switching away from Python -- now three decades old -- are usually negligible, so with the exception of a specific need (run-anywhere, above), I almost never pick something different.
And the final piece is code complexity, abstraction, and modularity. I don't feel bad adapting new numerical algorithms. It's usually a few hundred lines of self-contained code. If a better algorithms comes out, I might swap it out anyways. On the other hand, a programming language or framework is a lifetime commitment.
You work through all the risks and upsides, figuring maintenance is 90% of the cost, and you sometimes end up around the rules-of-thumb everyone gave. But not always.
Trick is to learn probability. It give a good mental framework for estimating expected costs and benefits. You don't usually do this explicitly with equations (what's the probability-Oracle-screws-us times costs-of-Oracle-screwing-us versus cost of upgrading to Python?), but it gives a language to think about risks.
Re: Choose Boring Technology
#24This is a fantastic piece! I’ve been advocating for “complexity points” for years now. MBSA (make boring sexy again!)
Re: Choose Boring Technology
#25I get so excited when I see a page that renders immediately with server side markup, it’s a rare old treat.
Re: Choose Boring Technology
#26There's a longer term issue that appears to be missing here. At what point do you change? There must be a point otherwise we'd all be here writing COBOL/CICS with some whizzy Javascript interface library. Over time it becomes harder and harder and more and more expensive to maintain old technology. Because frankly maintaining old technology is pretty boring and career destroying so you need to be paid more and more t…
I spoke once with a Microsoft consultant, he was advising us on upgrading strategy, as our customer had a mandate to be at least on version N-1, that is the customer must be on the latest major version or the version before, so at the time we were migrating off Windows 2003 as Windows 2012 was going through internal validation. He mentioned that on a bank he'd been advising, the mandate was the opposite, namely at mo…
In personal life, I do the something similar, actually. I have a state-of-the-art digital camera circa 2012, a state-of-the-art camcorder circa 2011, and similar. I'm always around five years behind the tech curve. The cost is often 1/2 to 1/10th, and I'm not sure I lose anything by being five years behind in terms of happiness or much of anything else.
As with anything, there are exceptions. My phone needs security updates, and 4k displays make me more productive at work, so there were places I bought the latest-and-greatest. And when I need to develop for a platform, well, I get that platform.
But for personal life? A used iPod touch 4th gen sells for $20 on eBay. XBox 360 can be had for around $40. Exceptionally nice digital cameras from a decade ago -- workhorses professional photographers used -- can be found for around $200.
The way I figure, I just behave as if I were born five years earlier. I use the same technology at age 25 as was available at age 20.
Re: Choose Boring Technology
#27There's a longer term issue that appears to be missing here. At what point do you change? There must be a point otherwise we'd all be here writing COBOL/CICS with some whizzy Javascript interface library. Over time it becomes harder and harder and more and more expensive to maintain old technology. Because frankly maintaining old technology is pretty boring and career destroying so you need to be paid more and more t…
Probably when there isn't a pipeline of people across the skill spectrum who can understand, maintain and deploy that tech.
If you can't find either a senior or a junior who can both use the same tech you need to perform the business task, then you might be too early or have to think about changing.
The difference in your requirements for juniors and seniors probably tells you about your potential rate of change. If you're based on a recent JS framework, those two will be closer together than a finance org running on COBOL.
Re: Choose Boring Technology
#28There's a longer term issue that appears to be missing here. At what point do you change? There must be a point otherwise we'd all be here writing COBOL/CICS with some whizzy Javascript interface library. Over time it becomes harder and harder and more and more expensive to maintain old technology. Because frankly maintaining old technology is pretty boring and career destroying so you need to be paid more and more t…
Recipe for getting things done: 1. Place every new & cool technology into mental quarantine for 3-5 years. 2. If, after that: a) the tech is still widely used, and doesn't seem to be getting overtaken by something else b) you're about to start a NEW project where the tech would help c) you're not in a rush and feel like trying something new ...then go for it. Learning complex tech that just arrived is a waste of your…
This works, but it does force you to ignore new enabling technologies that make new use cases economical, where most innovation and value creation is.
You'll be very efficient at accomplishing old use cases, which is just as well, because you'll need it - the market for them is most probably commodified, very competitive, and with low margins. Dominated by big actors with economies of scale. Not a comfortable place to be.
You'll probably get into very few new use cases, because by the time your 3-5 years quarantine passes on their enabling technology, they're already explored, if not conquered, by several competitors. The exception to this is new use cases without a new enabling technology, but those tend to ressemble fads, you'll have no tech moat, so again they'll be a very competitive, low margin market.
New techs create value only when they solve some use case more efficiently for someone. This creates value. Not all new techs do this. God knows that especially in software engineering, people deliver new techs for fun and name recognition all the time. Managers allow it as a perk, because of the tight labor market. But it's a mistake to consider all new techs to be in this later category.
New techs are also tech moats, giving you negotiating power to capture some of the created value. Without the tech moat, you better have a non-tech one (regulatory, institutional, market structure, economy of scale) because otherwise the value you capture will quickly be pushed to your marginal cost - if that - by competition.
Re: Choose Boring Technology
#29[deleted]
Re: Choose Boring Technology
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's even an expression for it: reinventing the wheel.
No, reinventing the wheel is alright; at best you may find a new and better kind of wheel, at worst you'll still learn something. This is forgetting that wheels can be round.
Thus, reinventing it, no?