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Boring Technology Checklist

blog.begin.com

11–20 of 119 posts

Re: Boring Technology Checklist

#11
post #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.

You say that, but setting up a LAMP stack from scratch is more involved than just yeeting something onto GCP these days.

Re: Boring Technology Checklist

#12

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.

Hiring wasn't in the articles' checklist though ;)

Valid point anyway

Re: Boring Technology Checklist

#13

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)

The fact you worry about what language they're written in - while you shouldn't need to ever edit any of their code - already implies they're not boring and you're overthinking the decision already.

Pick the one that gets you up and running the fastest, ideally one that doesn't rely on you installing additional runtimes.

Re: Boring Technology Checklist

#14

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)

Flip a coin, try the first one out, and if anything pops up in a few days that makes you think the other might be more suitable, evaluate the other one.

I recently started experimenting with Snowpack for JS build. I realized it doesn’t do sourcemaps very will so I grabbed Parcel. That worked great but doesn’t have a testing story and Vite has a couple options there. Vite has been good.

It was work to evaluate each of those and switch between them. But not that much work really since I hadn’t committed a huge codebase yet. But it was worth it because now I know why you might choose one over the other.

Granted the “boring” choice would be Webpack.

Re: Boring Technology Checklist

#17
This article would be enhanced with concrete examples. The "Boring Technology" argument is hard to attack because it's an opinion, an ideal. It's a good ideal, mind you, but it has the problem of being different for each person, even if they're all on the same team looking at the same use case.

Another good extension to the topic would also be defining when Boring Technology becomes Ancient Technology. You need to hit that middle of the tech curve where it's understood and stable but also still being maintained and keeping up with modern needs.

Re: Boring Technology Checklist

#18

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.

On the other hand you attract a certain kind of developer with those roles than generic languages.

Re: Boring Technology Checklist

#20

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)

Flip a coin, try the first one out, and if anything pops up in a few days that makes you think the other might be more suitable, evaluate the other one. I recently started experimenting with Snowpack for JS build. I realized it doesn’t do sourcemaps very will so I grabbed Parcel. That worked great but doesn’t have a testing story and Vite has a couple options there. Vite has been good. It was work to evaluate each of…

This a good advice for dealing with 'decision paralysis' which can make you waste more time than just trying out the options.
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