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Choose Boring Technology (2015)

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Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#121

Post by randombytes6869 »

ngngngng wrote: post #107
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…

I'm literally browsing hacker news right now to procrastinate work on an Angular task. I can't think of a less boring technology, I've been writing it for a couple years and it's still not simple to work with.

Switch to React if you can. I've been using Angular for years and the solution to problems is generally "more magic". Its so convoluted these days I don't think its even realistic to build an Angular app outside of angular-cli.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#122

Post by randombytes6869 »

didibus wrote: post #70
MattGaiser wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, t…

I think job descriptions are just marketing materials for developers at a lot of places. Advertising your COBOL just gets you people that want to make more COBOL.

Every job I take, whatever the oldest crappiest technology mentioned in the footnotes is, ends up being 90% of my job.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#123

Post by praveen9920 »

ngngngng wrote: post #107
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…

I'm literally browsing hacker news right now to procrastinate work on an Angular task. I can't think of a less boring technology, I've been writing it for a couple years and it's still not simple to work with.

Ever tried iconic? It may still feel boring but it makes things easier when developing.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#124

Post by ghc »

the-dude wrote: post #112
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny to call Django the "early web" when it first came out in 2005. That is really not early at all. Especially when you consider Rails, etc. predates that. I was an early Python adopter (1995/1996) and could not for the life of me find anybody who would consider letting me use it in 'mainstream' commercial software projects. Then all the sudden about 10 years ago it exploded in popularity big time. But I'd mov…

Wikipedia says Rails was released in Dec 2005.

Rails was popular before anyone ever heard of Django. Rails jobs were already common when it reached 1.0 at the end of 2005 (In early 2006 a law firm offered me $30 to do rails work as a summer job off campus). Django took another couple years before reaching 1.0, though I did do work for some early adopters (0.95) circa summer 2006.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#125

Post by scotty79 »

I think the problem is that not all programmers are motivated by successfully building things.

Lots of us are motivated by learning things, and some are motivated by investigating and solving problems when things don't go the way they supposed to.

If you pick a 'boring' technology, you have less of those two things, and you are stuck with boring process of developing one feature after the other with boring technology until sufficient number is developed and you can go do something more interesting.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#126

Post by agustif »

ashildr wrote: post #99
l0b0 wrote: post #13

As relevant as ever. It's fascinating how big web stacks are these days, even for small-to-medium sites: various combinations of at least one styling language (SASS/LESS/CSS), frontend framework (Angular/React), frontend language (JavaScript/TypeScript/Node.js), backend framework (Django/Express/Spring/Rails) backend language (Python/Ruby/PHP/Perl/Java), and message bus (ZeroMQ/Redis/RabbitMQ). That's just the fronte…

The young people in my company made sure our webpage is a react app. I gave in because they are having fun and it looks good, but it could have been done in static html (maybe using a generator) way more easily. It hurts me everytime I‘m thinking about it.

You could suggest them to use React/NextJS, but publish a static export (yarn export) which is the buildtime compiled HTML+CSS+JS from react, but without needing anything else.

Works well for static pages, this is what I did so II could use next/react and deploy to a boring LAMP server we have for our landing pages.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#127

Post by ikeyany »

ghc wrote: post #124
the-dude wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia says Rails was released in Dec 2005.

Rails was popular before anyone ever heard of Django. Rails jobs were already common when it reached 1.0 at the end of 2005 (In early 2006 a law firm offered me $30 to do rails work as a summer job off campus). Django took another couple years before reaching 1.0, though I did do work for some early adopters (0.95) circa summer 2006.

I think "early web" here refers to the popular technology used between 1995-2005.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#128

Post by tjpnz »

This is something I've lived by for the majority of my career. I wish I could share in the excitement of my peers when they discover a new shiny thing and push really hard to have it incorporated, my inability to share in that excitement has even shaken my confidence at times. What's worse is that it has resulted in friction at some of the places I've worked, even more so when the issues I've raised end up biting us hard in production.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#129

Post by theshrike79 »

nine_k wrote: post #62

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 choo…

Exactly.

If you know you need to cut a hundred trees to foot-long logs in a certain time-frame, you don't pick the new fancy gadget you just got from Kickstarter. You know, the one with a WiFi notification system and a cloud SaaS service etc.

You go with a regular hand-saw, axe and a proper chainsaw. You'll get your stuff done - on time and on budget. You might not get the thrill of using the latest and greatest tools, but you'll get paid.

After that you can grab the Solar/Hydrogen-powered Indiegogo-funded whizbang and go test in on a tree or two on your own time.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#130

Post by aww_dang »

I like to learn new things and solve new problems, but "Don't fix it if it isn't broken" are words to live by. Challenging myself with a new problem is rarely boring.

So many new technologies seem like something new just for the sake of it. By the time they mature into something as practical as 'boring tech' they have many of the same pitfalls if not more.

Perhaps many engineers lack agency in choosing the problems they solve, so they seek to change the tools they use instead?

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