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Choose Boring Technology

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Re: Choose Boring Technology

#331

Post by mschuster91 »

One thing I don't see mentioned is: why are people not honest with themselves?

We're using hyper-scalable databases, "serverless", layers upon layers of caching, microservices with dozens upon dozens of interconnects, all built out from the start for the odd chance that the thing we build will be the next unicorn startup.

But what is the reality? Many fail before the tech stack ever becomes a bottleneck and those who do not fail rarely reach the scale that requires the absurdities we use today.

A good old LAMP stack on a decent dedicated server is, honestly, way more than enough for 99.9% of startups and doesn't need highly expensive dedicated AWS and other specialists to get up and running in nearly no time.

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#332

Post by mschuster91 »

shapiro92 wrote: post #100

Such strongly opinionated statements should be taken with caution. In our profession context is key and this theory does not always apply in every context. Imagine if the Netflix guys were told to stay boring and not invent new shiny things? Ofcourse not everyone is in that scale. I do not want to use the latest shiny tech but I do not want it to be boring as well. We are confusing KISS and boring here. A company I u…

> Imagine if the Netflix guys were told to stay boring and not invent new shiny things?

For what it's worth most of what Netflix is doing is delivering video files. This in itself does not require rocket science, a matching amount of Squid or any other caching reverse proxy is sufficient - and CDNs at this scale have been around for far longer than Netflix was.

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#333

Post by cmroanirgo »

pjmlp wrote: post #271
jasim wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was the only programming environment (CA-Clipper) I knew at the time. VB6 was a thing, but I had some GUI-antipathy, coming from the older, "purer?" world of DOS. Also POS terminals needed first-class keyboard accessibility. SQL wasn't welcome either - you had to give up the fine grained control of row-level cursors in the flat-file xBase database and use a rather unwieldy looking language. I would still love to…

Well, if you would be using Turbo Vision, then there was mouse, callbacks, events, the whole stuff. And async would just be a couple of chained interrupts. I also used CA-Clipper, Summer '87 and the OOP variants 5.x. Most of the stuff did use a mouse and some TUI navigation, with menus and stuff, we had a couple of libraries for it. Now doing those forms it was pretty neat.

I had a pascal turbo vision accounts app. The client decided to share the data between two machines over a 10baseT network. With the exception of an occasional, but fully recoverable write issue (the user just had to retry their last save operation), I didn't have to lift a finger to get it past y2k. Mouse, printer (serial and parallel) were no problems. Good times.

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#334

Post by jasim »

cmroanirgo wrote: post #333
pjmlp wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if you would be using Turbo Vision, then there was mouse, callbacks, events, the whole stuff. And async would just be a couple of chained interrupts. I also used CA-Clipper, Summer '87 and the OOP variants 5.x. Most of the stuff did use a mouse and some TUI navigation, with menus and stuff, we had a couple of libraries for it. Now doing those forms it was pretty neat.

I had a pascal turbo vision accounts app. The client decided to share the data between two machines over a 10baseT network. With the exception of an occasional, but fully recoverable write issue (the user just had to retry their last save operation), I didn't have to lift a finger to get it past y2k. Mouse, printer (serial and parallel) were no problems. Good times.

Good times indeed!

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#335

Post by jasim »

pjmlp wrote: post #327
jasim wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I used to look longingly at Turbo Vision GUIs, but C++ was scary at the time. Do you think building TUIs with TV was qualitatively better than approaches popular today? Any insights why?

I used Turbo Pascal's variant of Turbo Vision. As for building TUIs not really, other than the usual Clipper entry forms. For example, when I moved from Turbo Vision (MS-DOS) into Object Windows Library (Turbo Pascal for Windows 1.5) I did not regret it. One thing I do conceed, a full keyboard experience is much better for data entry forms and on GUIs the mouse is given too much focus, although the same approach coul…

Nice to hear that!

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#336

Post by ozim »

esoterica wrote: post #184
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!

No, your mandate is to advance your career, not solve problems. If you’re rewarded for resume padding more than problem solving then keep resume padding.

It is nice to be idealistic, but what you wrote is true. Just like people think companies are doing best things for their customers. Companies do what is best for them, and it happens to align with what customers need, sometimes it is better for company to do something that is not good for their customers. The same applies to employees, most of the time what you do aligns with company goals, but when it does not, you have to change job or do something else.

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#337

Post by ghaff »

a_imho wrote: post #329
ghaff wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And in all fairness, many people seem to churn through places every year or two because (among other reasons) they value newness over longer term projects.

Do not agree, changing places has a very high cost. People change places because that's seems to be the only way to get a meaningful raise.

That is one reason people job hop. However I’ve known lots of people who also admit to just routinely getting bored after a couple of years.
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