Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Choose Boring Technology (2015)

mcfunley.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 297 posts

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#281

Post by namelosw »

ma2rten wrote: post #249
namelosw wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pretty much spot on. People usually missing the point of 'boring' because they would think of unpleasant and ancient stuff. The key value is indeed to avoid surprises. When I read WhatsApp used Erlang back in the day, I was pretty impressed. Not only the obvious things like Erlang was the forgotten secret weapon for massive concurrent apps, but also details like they used FreeBSD back in the day when there wa…

I mentioned in a comment below that a startup I worked for previously used Erlang. It was a giant headache. They initially used Mnesia as a database but it had issues (which I don't recall because it was before I joined). Then they switched to Riak which is written in Erlang, but was unstable at the time. They then used decided to use MySQL and Cassandra, but ran into issues because database drivers were contributed…

I agree with you that Erlang usually is not in the category of 'boring' technology.

It's pretty risky for most teams. Despite Erlang was old, those ideas are both alien and novel to most people. The idioms, the patterns, and the architectures are not well explored as mainstream languages. In my personal experiences, there are also many rough edges.

With that being said, the example I raised just to illustrate that the WhatsApp founders had deep understandings of Erlang despite it was a niche technology. The same applies to FreeBSD. Those are the so-called 'boring' technologies for them.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#282

Post by jerven »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #273
jp_sc wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't make sense. AFAIK with frameworks like Rails or Django you never expose their server directly to the Internet, you put a NGINX in front of it. And NGINX talks to the backend code via UNIX sockets, so support for it in NGINX is what matters. And sooner rather than later you are going to need a load balancer anyway.

That's not really good enough, you will have http1.1 between nginx and the actual server. Many features require actual code framework level support, like server-side push, realtime streams and grpc.

Yes, but these features are not yet impacting SEO.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#283

Post by galoisgirl »

limomium wrote: post #133
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…

Choose PHP.

No.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#284

Post by ksec »

ProZsolt wrote: post #216
derrekl wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is avoidable by continuing to use Ruby. Just continue to use it and contribute to the community, it's that easy. Ruby still has big businesses using it - Github, Airbnb, Shopify. There is no reason to believe it'll go the way of cold fusion. The language ecosystem is much different than 20 years ago. There are so many languages all thriving. Even Perl is relatively healthy and is a fine choice for doing many thi…

I came out a little bit negative in the end, but as I said I don't think it's going away. All these companies you listed using it with Rails and that part of the ecosystem is alive and well, but I'm not interested in it. A few years ago Ruby ruled the DevOps/Cloud space(which I working in), a lot of tools was written in it, but with the dawn of containerization, its former glory starting to fade. Docker, k8s, or even…

I dont think Ruby would ever be able to compete in that space. Even Hashicorp, the company that was born out of vagrant left Ruby and Chose Go.

I am thinking someday Crystal post 1.0 would be able to put up a fight in that space.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#285

Post by ksec »

gcoguiec wrote: post #83
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…

Mature Technology? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mature_technology )

Erlang is a Mature Technology, and fits Pt 1 - 2 but not Pt 3.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#286

Post by arsenico »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #61
arsenico wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

CSS in itself is not getting out of hand. Supporting LESS, SASS and Stylus and vanilla CSS in one project is getting out of hand. Same for everything else.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#287

Post by agustif »

bottled_poe wrote: post #159
agustif wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Don’t do this. I’ve just been through the process. Trust me. For a marketing website just use Wordpress and save your time for something more valuable.

It works for me, already shipped. A bit late for the advice I guess. Use what you know?

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#288

Post by cutemonster »

foobarian wrote: post #205
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…

I went through this recently when I joined a company and a small team to do a particular overhauling project. One of the developers was relatively junior, but smart, driven, and in love with shiny new tech. For the particular piece he worked on he chose modern solutions that went a bit out of the companywide envelope. I figured it's fine since if we forced the "boring" company-standard set of technologies he might ge…

> he chose modern solutions that went a bit out of the companywide envelope.

Did he ask if his tech choises were ok before he started?

Or informed you what was on his mind, although maybe didn't ask explicitly?

(I suppose maybe it's not so easy to say no, if one is worried that he'll then leave)

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#289

Post by cutemonster »

agustif wrote: post #287
bottled_poe wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t do this. I’ve just been through the process. Trust me. For a marketing website just use Wordpress and save your time for something more valuable.

It works for me, already shipped. A bit late for the advice I guess. Use what you know?

Works for me too -- for me, Gatsby or Hugo etc are quicker and simpler than WP

Especially long term wrt security

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#290

Post by iso1210 »

ghaff wrote: post #179
iso1210 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matts Script Archive was mid 90s. Mod perl maybe just squeezes into 'early web', I think /. used it in the late 90s. Perl wasn't the only CGI in the early days - a large internal web application I encountered as late as 2004 had it's CGIs written in C, running on IRIX PHP is certainly the newcomer as far as I'm concerned

Like a number of languages, PHP was around for quite a while before it really took off. PHP is probably most associated with "Web 2.0" as it became the model for web interactions in the mid-2000s.

php 3 was the first php as we know it, and that wasn't until 97 - before then it was more like SSI. It didn't really compete with mod perl until zend
Post reply on HN