What is the boring technology for frontend development?
Though it was far less clear when this article was written than it is now, if you're starting from scratch on a webapp today it's hard to go wrong with React.
Choose Boring Technology (2018)
61–70 of 137 posts
Re: Choose Boring Technology (2018)
#62While I see how this makes sense, I don't like this. If most people follow this strategy, we will end up with utter stagnation, or even devolution. "Boring" technology also has many hidden costs - most importantly, opportunity costs of not having several times higher productivity due to the warts and quirks of the boring tools. Sure, with enough practice one can work around them but every backwards issue takes a good…
"Boring" technology also has many hidden costs
i strongly disagree with that. what makes technology boring is the fact that it has less unknowns. ie no hidden costs. that doesn't mean there are no costs, but the costs of eg java are well documented. if those costs are a problem you can choose other tech with different costs. the danger with interesting tech is that the costs are unknown. you do not want unknowns in your tech stack. you have enough unknowns in the problem that you want to solve.
unless of course you are solving boring problems. most of the work out there is solving old and boring problems. there is no innovation to be had. in that case you may innovate in your tech stack instead.
in other words, choose one area to innovate. don't innovate in multiple areas at once.
Re: Choose Boring Technology (2018)
#63This 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…
Choosing a language before you even have an app matters. Changing the language your app is already written in or tacking on a microservice so you can use a 2nd language.... not such a good idea.
I chose php 8 years ago because I already knew it. Would I write my app in a different language today if I could? Probably. Should I do that now, when I have very few bugs (basically none of which are related to my language choice) and no performance issues? Probably not. Have I been tempted because shiny? Yes.
Delivering actual value to customers is what matters and there hasn't been anything I couldn't solve with a bit more PHP. Rewriting the whole app would probably kill my business.
Re: Choose Boring Technology (2018)
#64The 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…
Biggest time wasters and innovation token consumers IMO is third-party vendors, especially shiny startups/products. Don't waste your time, money and energy being someone else's guinea pig, you need to be focused on your business problems. Bigger companies that have engineers and resources to waste can try these out for you and eventually that startup you knew a few years ago will either be successful and ready for yo…
Generally speaking if a project has been around long enough folks have already encountered every problem and shared every solution.
I call it "StackOverflowability". Pick tech where you'll find all the answers you need on SO.
Re: Choose Boring Technology (2018)
#65What is the boring technology for frontend development?
Though it was far less clear when this article was written than it is now, if you're starting from scratch on a webapp today it's hard to go wrong with React.
there are a lot of voices against react too, so i would be careful. react is a good choice in that its downsides are well known and documented, so at least you can make an informed choice. but i would cast a wider net and look at svelte, vue and angular as well.
personally i use aurelia, but it being less popular means that less people write about it so there may be hidden downsides.
i am already familiar with it which is sufficient to qualify as boring for me. and i am also solving boring problems which allows me to spend my innovation tokens on my tech stack.
Re: Choose Boring Technology (2018)
#66The 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…
You can make bad technology choices today.
For example, if you were using Typescript to build a mobile app, you might be tempted to use TypeORM (32k stars on GitHub, been around since 2016, widely used). If you wanted to also use transactions and concurrency then this would be a mistake, because you would quickly find that TypeORM's SQLite adapter doesn't have a connection pool or locking for transactions, and will happily execute statements inside a transaction then roll them back without your knowledge.
Re: Choose Boring Technology (2018)
#67What is the boring technology for frontend development?
HTML and CSS.
Boring, reliable, accessible, extendable.
Only reach for JavaScript when it's actually required - which is less often than the modern web would suggest.
Re: Choose Boring Technology (2018)
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Biggest time wasters and innovation token consumers IMO is third-party vendors, especially shiny startups/products. Don't waste your time, money and energy being someone else's guinea pig, you need to be focused on your business problems. Bigger companies that have engineers and resources to waste can try these out for you and eventually that startup you knew a few years ago will either be successful and ready for yo…
Generally speaking if a project has been around long enough folks have already encountered every problem and shared every solution. I call it "StackOverflowability". Pick tech where you'll find all the answers you need on SO.
I am using express for a side project. A popular middleware was last touched 10 years ago. You can read all the source in 5 minutes. And it works. I craft forms tags like it is 1999 and use .ejs files which is like active server pages. If there is a problem I can figure it out from first principles. It is a relief compared to modern stacks.
Re: Choose Boring Technology (2018)
#69(2015)
Re: Choose Boring Technology (2018)
#70(2015)
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