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Choose Boring Technology (2015)

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Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#61

Post by jakelazaroff »

arsenico wrote: post #50
jakelazaroff wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of these things are actually necessary, though. Other than the frontend framework and language, basically all of those layers have been required for decades. You literally can’t make an “app” without either a frontend or backend language.

You're saying exactly what the message above states - either, or. It is totally possible to have a boring JS stack, or a boring Ruby stack, or a boring Python stack. And for most of use cases, that is more than enough. One of the best examples is Basecamp, but only because it has a very strict frugality around technology, which, as we see, pays off in the long run.

Sure, but what I was trying to get at was that it strikes me as very weird to count “CSS” or “a load balancer” or “a backend language” or “an SSL certificate” in a list of examples of how web development stacks have gotten out of hand.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#62

Post by nine_k »

I still think that "boring" is a wrong word.

Choose the technology you know in and out, and are immediately productive with.

Choose the technology which is sure to be around in 5-7 years, preferably 10-15.

Choose the technology for which you are comfortable hiring the next 15 engineers.

This does not mean that you need to choose something unpleasant, unergonomic, or ancient. Neither does it mean that you need to choose exclusively among the top 5 most used in the field.

The key thing here is to avoid surprises, unknown unknowns. You won't have the time to learn from a novice level while building a new company.

A number of wildly successful MVPs were implemented with obscure (or then-obscure) technology which authors knew very well, and which boosted their productivity. ViaWeb was written in Lisp. YouTube was (and still largely is) written in Python, way before it was cool and well-known. The initial Rust compiler was written in OCaml.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#63

Post by winrid »

praveen9920 wrote: post #37

We learned this lesson the hard way. A few years back, for a start-up, we picked angular 2.0 as our choice for frontend stack, when it is released. Though it was fun to develop it, We faced a lot of unknowns and issues to finally ship it. Too many changes for each version, The bundle size was too big. Angular SPAs were not great for SEOs etc. We ended up missing the shipping deadline by a couple of months. When you r…

Using Angular 8 and seems they fixed that if it was an issue. The bundle size is like 300kb without dependencies for a prod build, but I don't know what your requirements are.

300kb is a lot, but it's also a huge framework.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#65

Post by winrid »

twblalock wrote: post #35
MattGaiser wrote: post #4

This makes sense until I need to find a new job in 18 months.

There are more Java and C++ and Python jobs than Go or Rust or Typescript jobs, and I doubt that will change in 18 months. By the time new languages become the new industry standard, most developers will have had plenty of time to learn them. I've never heard of an industry change that happened so fast that it made the majority of working programmers obsolete in 18 months.

Maybe! But every recruiter I've talked to has a hell of a time finding Java or C++ jobs.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#66

Post by arsenico »

baron816 wrote: post #38
javajosh wrote: post #17

SPAs (single page applications) aren't boring yet. we really don't know how to do this well, as a community, and the cambrian explosion of JavaScript tech is almost all around trying to make this extremely un-boring application style more boring. The SPA is a gateway drug to spending lots and lots of innovation tokens, more, really, than almost any dev team can afford. For example, I would consider each of Webpack, P…

React has been around for 7 years. ES2015 has been around for 5 years. React has become the de facto lingua franca for front end development. Could you imagine some CTO or technical lead saying, "We're not going to use React because it's too new and unproven." React has proven itself. Facebooks has 100K+ components. There are no unknowns there. Using jQuery or vanilla JS instead would be way more problematic and have…

Not "new" doesn't mean boring. Boring means not using a technology (a framework, or a language) when not needed. Don't use Javascript on the frontend, when not needed, stick with one CSS pre-processor, one database, one cloud provider, one orchestration tool, one CI tool. Be frugal with your stack, and it will payoff.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#67

Post by speedgoose »

choeger wrote: post #51
gavinray wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know that necessarily correct. Previous startup I was at had a stack like this: - Frontend: Vue + Typescript - Android/iOS App: Vue (NativeScript/Capacitor) + Typescript - Backend: Node + Typescript - Database: Postgres - Deployment: Everything in Docker containers I know of a lot of places taking similar stances where the frontend and mobile apps are done in this way (IE React and React Native) and then you…

You basically have arrived where lisp was some decades ago. Logical next steps are to write the OS and the editor and the VCS in JavaScript. However, at some point you will have a look into your myriad of nodejs dependencies and see with horror that they rely on C++ extensions. Then you learn that your precious stack is just a GCC upgrade away from not building anymore. And noone in your company even remembers what t…

If a NPM package requires a C++ compiler, I ignore it and move on.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#68

Post by AmericanChopper »

choeger wrote: post #51
gavinray wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know that necessarily correct. Previous startup I was at had a stack like this: - Frontend: Vue + Typescript - Android/iOS App: Vue (NativeScript/Capacitor) + Typescript - Backend: Node + Typescript - Database: Postgres - Deployment: Everything in Docker containers I know of a lot of places taking similar stances where the frontend and mobile apps are done in this way (IE React and React Native) and then you…

You basically have arrived where lisp was some decades ago. Logical next steps are to write the OS and the editor and the VCS in JavaScript. However, at some point you will have a look into your myriad of nodejs dependencies and see with horror that they rely on C++ extensions. Then you learn that your precious stack is just a GCC upgrade away from not building anymore. And noone in your company even remembers what t…

Whether you end up with a hellish dependency tree is more up to the developer than the language. I’d say the only reason this is more common in node projects than it is in other languages is because dependency management in other languages is more tedious, so the barrier for introducing new dependencies is higher.

All of my node projects have had rather tidy dependency trees. It’s also been quite easy for me to use popular packages. If something breaks and hundreds of thousands of devs are impacted by it, it’s going to get fixed pretty quick. Which has been my experience in the rare occasions that in of my dependencies has broken, it’s been fixed before it even had a chance to impact me.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#69

Post by risyachka »

archived22 wrote: post #39

Job description these days become reflection of complexity in new age tech stack. Know C++/Java/Scala/Enter_Your_Lang_Here with python and React/Angular/Blah/Blah with Big Data Technologies - Hadoop, spark, etc. with Docker/K8 and with Azure/GCP/AWS. It is time consuming process to become expert of one thing, requires couple of years of continuous focus. I don't know How many people are actually expert of all these a…

Almost no one. And you don't need an interview for that. As you said, it requires a few years of continuous focus. And most jobs won't give you that. So it's even more time.

And if a person with 5 years of experience sais he is an expert in a,b,c,d,e you don't need an interview do understand that this person doesn't even know what it takes to be an expert in one of these, because he obviously can't evaluate his skillset properly.

Nowadays you need very little to qualify to be "expert" or "senior".Sure there are exceptions, but in most cases, all you need is be able to use the technology. In most cases, people don't even understand how it works under the hood.

Just like with full-stack developers. Most of those whom I have seen know some front-end, some back end, and very basic database knowledge. And considering that in these cases both front-end and back-end are written in js mostly, "full-stack" here is a huge overstretch.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#70

Post by didibus »

MattGaiser wrote: post #30
jghn wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I personally love the "hot" tech, but anyone claiming there are more jobs for those skills than the tried & trued is being disingenuous

I think it depends on where you want to work. If you check out the YC job boards, they want TypeScript, Go, and GraphQL.

I've found in general the places that use Java don't look for a Java developer. Its like they just assume you can pick it up. You might see things like knowledge of OOP, SQL, etc. on the job listing. For example, lots of large companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Twitter, Netflix, etc. have a ton of Java, but their job descriptions don't really mention it.

On the other hand, if a place needs Typescript, or GO, they'll mention it.

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