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Choose Boring Technology (2018)

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Re: Choose Boring Technology (2018)

#21

Post by kyawzazaw »

lmm wrote: post #16

He writes all this philosophy and then concludes with using PostgreSQL instead of mongoDB or nodeJS (? I'm not sure how that was in the same category). PostgreSQL is the opposite of boring technology; I've been using it for over 10 years and am still discovering new and surprising features with new and surprising failure modes; PostgreSQL today is very different from PostgreSQL 10 years ago, but setting it up for tru…

doesn't that mean you are now ready for a new innovation token, which is inline with the written philosophy?

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2018)

#22

Post by kyawzazaw »

andrewstuart wrote: post #4

edit: Apparently "choose boring technology" is just clickbait, and in fact the guy advocates for all the nuanced technology selection advocated here.... so errr, apparently he in fact is saying "don't chose boring technology" or something, whatever. I completely disagree with almost any blanket philosophy on technology. Don't choose boring technology. Choose technology that suits the context: * choose what you like f…

i gotta ask if you read the whole site

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2018)

#23

Post by Affric »

tedunangst wrote: post #9
andrewstuart wrote: post #4

edit: Apparently "choose boring technology" is just clickbait, and in fact the guy advocates for all the nuanced technology selection advocated here.... so errr, apparently he in fact is saying "don't chose boring technology" or something, whatever. I completely disagree with almost any blanket philosophy on technology. Don't choose boring technology. Choose technology that suits the context: * choose what you like f…

Open the link again and scroll down.

> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that". [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2018)

#24

Post by kyawzazaw »

fnfjfk wrote: post #17

This article gets posted a lot, but I find it a little unsatisfying. I think it’s because it’s pretty vague about what “boring” means exactly, so it’s the kind of statement most can agree with, without it actually being a very strong statement. It’s not wrong per se, don’t choose some technology posted for the first time yesterday. But if you make the choice of Java (boring) over Kotlin (shiny new), you’re possibly s…

> But if you make the choice of Java (boring) over Kotlin (shiny new), you’re possibly signing up for a curse of chasing NPEs, which Kotlin would have caught at compile-time. Or if you choose C++ over Rust, same general idea.

But isn't the point that if you run into this much issue for the initial choice, you are now ready to use an innovation token and switch to a different one?

> Some semblance of safety needs to be bolted on separately, and at large scale they will cost your company $$$ vs. a more performance-friendly language (the latter doesn’t matter so much if you are a tiny startup with no users yet).

At that point with all the financial resources, they can consider to rewrite/migrate. Thus, at the start, chose boring technology.

Even at a big company, retraining or hiring people proficient in Rust will probably cost more than continuing to use C++ codebase and people.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2018)

#25

Post by ksec »

lmm wrote: post #16

He writes all this philosophy and then concludes with using PostgreSQL instead of mongoDB or nodeJS (? I'm not sure how that was in the same category). PostgreSQL is the opposite of boring technology; I've been using it for over 10 years and am still discovering new and surprising features with new and surprising failure modes; PostgreSQL today is very different from PostgreSQL 10 years ago, but setting it up for tru…

I would have thought MySQL would be a better fit for boring technology.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2018)

#26

Post by gaganyaan »

ksec wrote: post #25
lmm wrote: post #16

He writes all this philosophy and then concludes with using PostgreSQL instead of mongoDB or nodeJS (? I'm not sure how that was in the same category). PostgreSQL is the opposite of boring technology; I've been using it for over 10 years and am still discovering new and surprising features with new and surprising failure modes; PostgreSQL today is very different from PostgreSQL 10 years ago, but setting it up for tru…

I would have thought MySQL would be a better fit for boring technology.

Given that the author compared MongoDB vs PostgreSQL, I think the technology in question is SQL vs NoSQL, not a particular flavor of SQL vs the other.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2018)

#27

Post by eitland »

fnfjfk wrote: post #17

This article gets posted a lot, but I find it a little unsatisfying. I think it’s because it’s pretty vague about what “boring” means exactly, so it’s the kind of statement most can agree with, without it actually being a very strong statement. It’s not wrong per se, don’t choose some technology posted for the first time yesterday. But if you make the choice of Java (boring) over Kotlin (shiny new), you’re possibly s…

> But if you make the choice of Java (boring) over Kotlin (shiny new), you’re possibly signing up for a curse of chasing NPEs

You are also choosing

-to let your team choose their own IDE

- easy to debug

- frameworks that works out of the box

- and continue to work regardless of Kotlin versions (since one doesn't use Kotlin)

- to no have to deal with a number of "interesting" ways to write code

I like Kotlin. But it is more nuanced than some people would like to have us believe.

Personally I think I have spent far more time over the last three or four years hand holding Kotlin and cleaning up "clean code" than I have saved by less NPEs.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2018)

#28

Post by philosophywaves »

fnfjfk wrote: post #17

This article gets posted a lot, but I find it a little unsatisfying. I think it’s because it’s pretty vague about what “boring” means exactly, so it’s the kind of statement most can agree with, without it actually being a very strong statement. It’s not wrong per se, don’t choose some technology posted for the first time yesterday. But if you make the choice of Java (boring) over Kotlin (shiny new), you’re possibly s…

I think the reason it resonates with people is that a common failure mode in technology is picking the wrong tech for the problem, and this often happens because engineers like to learn and pick things they are unfamiliar with so that they get that buzz. Most of the value in this article can be boiled down to telling engineers to not make tech decisions based on the brainy feelgoods. It's like telling people to eat their vegetables. Boring, straightforward advice, but a good path to a healthier body.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2018)

#29

Post by chii »

mikece wrote: post #11

The points often lost here is that (1) this advice is aimed at startups, and (2) the whole concept of "innovation tokens." Any successful business is going to solve some problem which is probably not so obvious and that takes innovative thinking. If you're spending too much time trying to be innovative with your tech stack then you're NOT innovating on your specific difference as a business, and that hold you back (o…

> I'm not even sure what tech is out there that would qualify as "spending your innovation tokens" other than AI.

that's why they call it innovating. If you knew already, then it wouldn't be innovating, since it's not the innovation that's new.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2018)

#30

Post by simonw »

lmm wrote: post #16

He writes all this philosophy and then concludes with using PostgreSQL instead of mongoDB or nodeJS (? I'm not sure how that was in the same category). PostgreSQL is the opposite of boring technology; I've been using it for over 10 years and am still discovering new and surprising features with new and surprising failure modes; PostgreSQL today is very different from PostgreSQL 10 years ago, but setting it up for tru…

PostgreSQL is absolutely boring technology.

What makes it boring is:

- people have been using it for decades, for all kinds of different things

- this means that any problem you run into, someone else will have seen before - and will have talked about it online

- you're not going to be using it to solve a class of problems that no one else has used it for before

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