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Boring Technology Checklist

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Re: Boring Technology Checklist

#3

What about between 2 boring technologies? For example I’m debating between Eleventy and Hugo (because I know both JS and Go, but not Ruby so I will skip Jekyll)

Compare them in your particular scenario. Only you know what is important to you. If choosing for a company, ask the people who will have to work with it.

Maybe one has more responsive developers, or a more helpful community.

Re: Boring Technology Checklist

#5

I was surprised to find this published on begin.com, which offers an app deployment platform based on AWS Lambda. So are Lambda, API Gateway, and friends considered boring now?

Nobody gets fired for choosing IBM, and nobody gets fired for choosing AWS.

The corollary that's missing, of course, is that they often should get fired—but popular (sorry, "boring") choices have a momentum of their own.

Re: Boring Technology Checklist

#6

I was surprised to find this published on begin.com, which offers an app deployment platform based on AWS Lambda. So are Lambda, API Gateway, and friends considered boring now?

They may not be, but cgi-bin, webservers, and monitoring via grep /var/log/www/*.log are.

Re: Boring Technology Checklist

#7
Missing two of the biggest:

- hireability: large community of developers to hire from today + years from now

- low risk of abandonment: long history of development, stable funding, and ideally many users+contributors from diff orgs using in commercial contexts

Not easy for startups and new frameworks to achieve 'boring' status!

Re: Boring Technology Checklist

#8
Weirdly enough I do believe Clojure ticks the boxes from that checklist.

It's familiar in that it both "supports popular language runtimes" (runs on top of the JVM or transpiles to JavaScript) and it's a Lisp dialect (or close enough) and Lisps have been around since a very long time.

It's incredibly stable: so stable some libraries commonly used haven't been updated in years. There's also very little code churn inside Clojure's own codebase.

It is very reliable.

It's limits and trade offs are well known.

Somehow I though my language of choice was "edgy" but I realize it may actually be "boring": a dialect from a very old family of language running on top of a boring tech (the JVM).

Re: Boring Technology Checklist

#9

I was surprised to find this published on begin.com, which offers an app deployment platform based on AWS Lambda. So are Lambda, API Gateway, and friends considered boring now?

Is lambda really that different from any other server technology?

It’s just a container that you have to boot and it handles web requests, right?

They boot fast, so for a low traffic site you can worry less about cold start, is there any other difference with any other containerized web server?

Re: Boring Technology Checklist

#10

Weirdly enough I do believe Clojure ticks the boxes from that checklist. It's familiar in that it both "supports popular language runtimes" (runs on top of the JVM or transpiles to JavaScript) and it's a Lisp dialect (or close enough) and Lisps have been around since a very long time. It's incredibly stable: so stable some libraries commonly used haven't been updated in years . There's also very little code churn ins…

How about hiring though? If you have a vacancy for a Clojure developer, how many applicants could you expect?

When it comes to programming languages, I'd stick to the top 10 languages if your company isn't hip enough to attract a certain kind of developer on its own.

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