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Choose Boring Technology

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Re: Choose Boring Technology

#31

Post by taneq »

neilwilson wrote: post #5

There'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…

You change when the new tech becomes boring. Boring indicates well known, reliable, and efficient.

Play with the cool new thing in your R&D time. Stick with tried and tested in your implementation time. That's the difference between hacking and engineering.

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#32

Post by macspoofing »

ovi256 wrote: post #28
rlonn wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

You're talking about a tech stack, which is not the same as, for example, a modern web application. You can build a perfectly modern web app with 'old' Java/JEE stack, backed by an unsexy SQL-based database. You don't need Node.js with MongoDB.

Techstacks very very very rarely enable new use-cases. They are the equivalent of fashion statements by young developers who haven't learned what it means to support software for 10-20 years.

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#33

Post by close04 »

pnongrata wrote: post #30
enriquto wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Learning from the past isn't to prevent you from reinventing the wheel but from reinventing the pothole.

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#35

Post by jacques_chester »

murgindrag wrote: post #23
neilwilson wrote: post #5

There'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…

Oracle created a brand new market in Java support contracts which didn't exist before, so that they could enter it and make a buck (wherein FUD is a standard sales tactic for them). They probably viewed their position on the OpenJDK as subsidising a public good, which in general is slightly out of character for Oracle.

Most enterprise vendors have, or will soon have, comparable products for sale. My employers have Pivotal Spring Runtime[0]. You can also get OpenJDK coverage from Red Hat[1], Amazon[2], Azul[3] and so on.

Incidentally I resent that I sometimes wind up defending Oracle's decisions. I think it was globally suboptimal but I can understand their reasoning.

[0] https://pivotal.io/pivotal-spring-runtime

[1] https://access.redhat.com/articles/1299013

[2] https://aws.amazon.com/corretto/

[3] https://www.azul.com/products/zulu-enterprise/

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#36

Post by snthd »

close04 wrote: post #33
pnongrata wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thus, reinventing it, no?

Learning from the past isn't to prevent you from reinventing the wheel but from reinventing the pothole.

Nothing wrong with reinventing potholes...

https://www.indy100.com/article/this-man-is-painting-penises...

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#37

Post by crispyambulance »

dm3 wrote: post #3

Another case of someone discovering, after 10+ years in tech, that code is a liability and you're supposed to solve problems instead of chasing trends and padding the resume. Great that he's spreading the word!

Code is not "a liability".

It is a tool that can be used masterfully or utterly abused.

Every craftsman has to invest in their tools. And for someone to truly master their craft they must sometimes hone their tool skills speculatively, without short-term gain, and by sacrificing the time and attention used for other things, like actual projects.

If everyone just obeyed their project manager and always focused 100% on the problem at hand, we would be producing sad, boring things. If you want to see what that's like look at enterprise applications.

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#38

Post by joaodlf »

I am more and more resonating with these feelings, for the good and bad. In fact, my own writing reflects that over the years: https://joaodlf.com/ , I started my blog with information regarding technologies like Spark, Cassandra, Go, etc, and I am now writing about Postgres and Python web dev and Celery.

Boring is boring but it simplifies so much. I still love new technology, but I am now much more likely to try it out extensively and privately before even dreaming of bringing it to my company. An example: A few years ago I got very excited about Go, I started introducing it at work and solved some difficult issues with it. I could not get the rest of the developers to gain an interest in the language, though. Effectively, no one else but me could touch any of that code, this is not good for business. I have now revamped that same code, using old technology, and learned a lot along the way - so much so that I now feel like this old tech behaves as nicely as the more complicated, flashy, new language implementation.

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#39

Post by reallydontask »

murgindrag wrote: post #26
reallydontask wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's certainly a novel approach in this era where everybody seems to want to have the latest and greatest.

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#40

Post by agumonkey »

dm3 wrote: post #3

Another case of someone discovering, after 10+ years in tech, that code is a liability and you're supposed to solve problems instead of chasing trends and padding the resume. Great that he's spreading the word!

chasing trends is a problem but suffering java You can deliver so much more, so much safer using other techniques...
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