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Choose Boring Technology (2015)

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Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#221

Post by tomc1985 »

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…

Can I be honest? I fucking hate developers. We're like magpies of the worst variety. How many times have I had to argue against bringing in ${NEW_TECH} or ${NEW_TECHNIQUE} because it would be more trouble than its worth. No, it doesn't look as cool engineering-wise, and yes, our work may be a little harder because of it. But then they win the argument and we implement it and hey! Those problems I told you about? They're real! And if they had done it my way we could have moved on to the next thing and not had to worry about this.

Fuck the latest thing. Fuck resume driven development. Fuck magpies. Choose the boring path. Fuck developers!

The worst thing we do is obsess over the latest, coolest tech. Everyone is stepping on their brothers and sisters in this field because they want to be the loser that invented ${NEW_TECH}. We spend so much time optimizing for 'developer happiness' (a.k.a. the new shiny thing) that we forget about architecture.

I am so sick of this field.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#222

Post by michaelbrave »

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…

Ironically I was watching a talk on youtube yesterday by Richard Feldman of NoRedInk[0] that was basically explaining why and how they implemented Elm in production. The most interesting part of the talk to me was how he said it shaped their recruitment pipeline, going from needing recruiters to basically having it full and they can take their pick, and this mostly due to the fact that they were willing to use newer technology stacks. So the long and the short of it is I think you're right, this would affect retention and probably recruiting as well.

I'm a new developer looking for my first job and so I'm making side project to learn in the meantime and what I primarily want from a job is the ability to increase my skills, to get better and to improve, I feel like the kinds of places that are willing and able to experiment will not only have more of a learning culture but will attract others like that as well, so they are more attractive to me as a developer. I imagine this could be countered by things like proper mentor-ship programs or side project time like you've already implemented.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CYeZ2kEiOI

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#223

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

the_af wrote: post #191
mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that’s largely true, but not completely. It just turns out that certain language features sincerely matter more for business software, such as rapidly mutating object & data models without needs to update them as a ripple effect through other designs in the system, and the ability to trade-off safety or correctness as resources just like memory or runtime complexity, which Java as a language is just not set u…

Maybe my brain is slow today, so please excuse me if this is not what you're saying. Are you arguing that Java is not set up to "do easily" business software or rapidly mutating data structures? Because Java as a battle tested platform has evolved many cool features for exactly those cases. There are even commercial pauseless garbage collectors (and the noncommercial ones are pretty advanced, too). Java and the JVM r…

A reliance on object orientation as a non-negotiable language requirement is intrinsically antithetical to efficiency for business software.

If a language supports what I would call “lightweight OO” - extremely low boiler plate, zero required OO constructs (purely optional), and language features that render the concept of dependency injection intrinsically obsolete (because mocking can be done purely through introspection at no cost), then that flavor of OO is well suited for business problems.

It has less to do with things like JVM or GC oddities, because those can be straightforwardly engineered around. It’s more about what non-negotiable commitments to specific patterns or strategies come along with the language choice.

Pure functional languages are the worst offenders in this area, which is why their benefits aren’t actually benefits and they are poorly suited for business software. Of the core “industry standard languages” Java would be the next worst offender.

Conversely, I think C# is an ecosystem that suffered the same limitations as Java but found ways to extend and reinvent that make it more attractive now, though still far behind Python, C and C++.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#224

Post by pydry »

w7 wrote: post #206
pydry wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever I hear "exciting tech" I tend to think "hyped to kingdom come". I think of node, docker, mongo, golang, etc. - tech that was pushed with marketing $$$ or big names. I have an inbuilt bias against that stuff - not that it's necessarily worse than alternatives but that the marketing budget or big name backer instantly makes me more suspicious. For most developers it seems to work the other way around - big nam…

I'd honestly consider Golang "excitingly boring". Simple C-ish syntax that's relatively familiar to most programmers, write once and compile to/from anywhere without arcane flags, easy to understand and use concurrency model with message passing, reference development tooling that can enforce standards out of the box. I don't think there is much new here other than removal of cruft.

In the beginning it's selling point was small binaries and neat concurrency.

The tech was "exciting" because Google released it. Pretty much anything Google releases is coated in magic pixie fairy dust (perhaps slightly less so these days).

Tech like postgres doesn't get that kind of hype.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#225

Post by nickysielicki »

One of the more frustrating things is that you can have a team that reads this article and all agree about the goal but disagree about what is actually boring and safe and worth doing.

There are a lot of people who confuse “boring” with “well-known”, and they’re not the same thing.

Example: you decide to write C++, but the C++ you write looks a lot like C99. You rationalize it as though you’re avoiding the overhead of all that nonsensical modern C++ and doing the simpler and thus more-boring thing. In reality: you’re writing shitty C++.

For the technology you choose, you should buy into it. Full stop. Don’t half-ass it.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#226

Post by praveen9920 »

xtracto wrote: post #182
praveen9920 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wouldn't call them immature, they could probably be called fast paced.

It might help if you stick to one version until shipping something meaningful

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#227

Post by ByteJockey »

the_af wrote: post #192
pdimitar wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You cannot judge a language and platform merely by legacy software. By that token, almost everything today is horribly broken, even trendier technologies like NodeJS or Go. You'd have to judge C by K&R standards, and C++ as the horrible preprocessor it initially was. It makes no sense! You must judge Java by the developments of the last decade at the very least . Otherwise you're ignoring the practitioners. Java hasn…

> You must judge Java by the developments of the last decade at the very least. Otherwise you're ignoring the practitioners.

I think plurality of situations it's actually used for currently would be a better standard than what you're advocating for.

This has the advantage that the merits people judge things on, and the experience they will most likely have using it will line up.

The downside is that, the merits used may differ a bit between markets or industries, but I'm personally ok with that.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#228

Post by markus_zhang »

djmips wrote: post #220
markus_zhang wrote: post #213

I actually get why engineers, especially young ones prefer new techs sometimes. Think it this way. You join a company and get two choices. One is to use a reliable albeit old system, read tons of legacy code and figure out how to do things other guys' way. The other is to build new things from ground up when you have a much bigger feeling of ownership, but risk breaking things up. Which one do you choose? Note that y…

Every boring tech was once new and exciting at one time. Without someone taking a risk everything would be boring.

Yeah exactly.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#229

Post by hamilyon2 »

nickysielicki wrote: post #225

One of the more frustrating things is that you can have a team that reads this article and all agree about the goal but disagree about what is actually boring and safe and worth doing. There are a lot of people who confuse “boring” with “well-known”, and they’re not the same thing. Example: you decide to write C++, but the C++ you write looks a lot like C99. You rationalize it as though you’re avoiding the overhead o…

Your example is controversial. What if that C99 coding style is company-wide accepted and everyone is comfortable with it. On contrary, newer, more shiny thing, like c++20 is not supported in tools and adds significant mental overhead.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#230

Post by twblalock »

teambayleaf wrote: post #44
twblalock wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the lesson here is "don't be a commodity"? In this light, PHP coders are real commodities. They are paid lowly, treated as expendable, and get no respect by peers. I think they're going down the same path of "HTML experts" which were once lucrative business in early 1990s. Java/C++ programmers fare better because (I guess) there is some fundamental difficulty to be proficient at them. So, despite being old an…

Java and C++ aren’t popular because they are difficult to be proficient at. They are popular because they fit the needs of enterprise software better than other languages, and enterprise companies committed to them a long time ago and have huge amounts of software written in those languages.
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