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Choose Boring Technology (2015)

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Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#181

Post by HelloNurse »

pdimitar wrote: post #155
the_af wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? Java is used to great success in the software industry. It's a good language and platform, fads to the contrary notwithstanding.

When you are actually coding Java -- yes. But as a sibling commenter pointed out, there's a lot of "XML as code" in the Java world. That's really hard to work with.

XML as code can (and often does) work as intended.

It's much less annoying than "exciting" episodes and habits:

  - let's see if our SSL certificate has been actually updated on all servers in the cluster
  - let's find out what I need to restart after deploying my web app update
  - who knows what the classpath loading order will be this time; if it's broken you can try a restart
  - finish the test quickly before the sysadmin committee begins an application server upgrade and everything goes offline for as long as it takes, hopefully only a few hours

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#182

Post by xtracto »

praveen9920 wrote: post #123
ngngngng wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I like ionic a d it deffinitely is better than plain Angular. But Ionic is VERY immature technology: they keep moving the goal post and changing things. The latest version again changes crap with the replacement of Cordova.

And if you search their forums on how to do something (like take a video in mobile and then showing it on the ui) it depends on each version and there are no clear answer.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#183

Post by xtracto »

noncoml wrote: post #10

I thought MongoDB and NodeJS are the boring technology today... Edit: Oh, it needs a (2015)

MongoDB is full of surprises, especially when it chews your data for no given reason or when its performance slows to a crawl.

I'll take ye old PostgreSQL (with JSONB if I need unstructured data) or even mariadb.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#184

Post by leonardteo »

Getting vulnerable here for a sec and hoping that others can add their thoughts. I struggle with this. As a small-ish, bootstrapped business, the issue I commonly run into is developer retention. If we stand our ground and choose boring technology because we have limited innovation tokens and can't afford to waste them, there's the flight risk of those devs who really want to work with those new technologies. And this is real. I have dev friends who have left great jobs just because they wanted to move to some new tech and their company simply wasn't ready for the change yet.

In the past I have been told that I "don't trust developers" (despite being one myself), and it has nothing to do with that. It's that some of us are left with the consequences of those decisions and having to maintain those NIH-riddled skeletons in the closet when those individuals leave - and the next person comes along, finds the skeletons and we end up having to rewrite/reimplement that whole part of the system.

Creating an environment where we can thrive and be creative is really challenging. We've implemented the 20% time now where everyone in the company has 1 day a week to just experiment and do whatever they want, just to give the breathing room to be creative and try some of these new technologies. We finally got there. But for years, we just couldn't afford to do it as we were in survival mode.

But the retention issue is still a big one. I feel the tension between having to empower people to make decisions that are for the greater good of the business, while balancing that those people can (and will) leave at any time and not face the consequences of those decisions.

Curious to hear thoughts.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#185

Post by [deleted] »

pdimitar wrote: post #178
the_af wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't dealt with "a lot of XML" in Java for ages. I've been using it in my day job for a decade, and about the only XML I touch is pom.xml (that's the build file for Maven). This is like complaining about stuff in Java 1.4 -- sure, but we haven't been using it for ages. Please don't take it the wrong way, but the days of XML for everything are long gone, and for years in Java it's been XML for nothing as a counte…

Your experience doesn't nullify mine, and vice versa. There's a huge pile of legacy Java applications out there still needing maintenance and occasional new features.

[deleted]

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#186

Post by xtracto »

theshrike79 wrote: post #139
ngngngng wrote: post #108

I once overheard a conversation between two colleagues. "I'm not interested in learning Go because it doesn't have many compelling features" "That IS the feature"

Having to build stuff from basic blocks with no hidden magic is the best part in Go. It's SO boring, but also very efficient. Yes, you type more words, but that's why you got the fancy clicky keyboard. You get stuff done and other people can actually understand your code, because there are no hidden gotchas, everything is just as you typed it out. Even the boring and repetitive if err != nil stuff just fades away, bu…

In 1999 when I finished my Bsc in Software Eng I loved to do my own tools instead of using stdlib or boost or other C libraries for the same reason.

Now I value my time more and I prefer to focus on programming what gives value to the business I am building to.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#187

Post by granshaw »

leonardteo wrote: post #184

Getting vulnerable here for a sec and hoping that others can add their thoughts. I struggle with this. As a small-ish, bootstrapped business, the issue I commonly run into is developer retention. If we stand our ground and choose boring technology because we have limited innovation tokens and can't afford to waste them, there's the flight risk of those devs who really want to work with those new technologies. And thi…

IMO giving Engineers “space to learn” and “work with new tech” is one of the greatest challenges any Engineering leader faces. I have a pet theory that the soa/micro services trend has in large part been driven by this problem - giving a space to work with such new tech with a limited blast radius, also at the expense of overall velocity and maintainability.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#188

Post by matwood »

wpietri wrote: post #144
tarkin2 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Java is pretty boring but I wouldn’t recommend for the majority of cases.

Java is boring in one sense, but it's the wrong kind of exciting in another. I've had to touch it a couple times in the last few years, and there's still a ton of "enterprise" nonsense in the space. Everything feels bloated, confused, unpolished. It's like I'm walking along, step on a trapdoor, and suddenly am sucked down into a tangle of stack traces, class loaders, annotations, and XML configs. For me, part of "bor…

> For me, part of "boring" is being like a 2x4 or a claw hammer: simple, solid, reliable, well understood. A lot of the Java world is nothing like that.

TBH, this is exactly what the Java world is like. There are not many surprises in Java land. The language isn't getting fantasy land changes on a daily basis. There are libraries that haven't been updated in years because there hasn't been a need to update them - they just work. People want to leave Java because it's boring.

Is Java perfect? Of course not, no language is perfect. But, Java is the closest thing to a boring 2x4 the programming world has ever invented.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#189

Post by jghn »

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.

Sure. If I want to only work with the hot tech then yes, my choices are limited to companies using hot tech. But the reality is that the vast majority of development jobs are using the old standbys.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#190

Post by Pxtl »

wpietri wrote: post #144
tarkin2 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Java is pretty boring but I wouldn’t recommend for the majority of cases.

Java is boring in one sense, but it's the wrong kind of exciting in another. I've had to touch it a couple times in the last few years, and there's still a ton of "enterprise" nonsense in the space. Everything feels bloated, confused, unpolished. It's like I'm walking along, step on a trapdoor, and suddenly am sucked down into a tangle of stack traces, class loaders, annotations, and XML configs. For me, part of "bor…

Yeah, boring vs exciting is a false dichotomy. Early-2000s Enterprise Java is neither - it's intimidating, because the code is so bureaucratic that it's impossible to properly understand the implications of any given action, and bureaucratic software is inherently buggy in my experience because there are so many interactions that inevitably something will trip over an unexpected edge-case of some other thing.
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