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Choose Boring Technology (2015)

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Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#71

Post by ipsod »

infamia wrote: post #22
epolanski wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I learned about AI is that, e.g., if you're making websites you're much better off going for php/ruby/elixir, even if you don't like the languages much. Pipelines and deploys gets much easier and faster than the very common TypeScript monorepo, and so does communication between server and client. And I say that as a TypeScript and Effect aficionado who has no particular love for neither php or ruby, but the…

Great point! I'd also add that Django's another solid choice for boring tech that LLM agents will know very well and will very likely continue to do so. A fair bit of SWE Bench and other Python benchmarks are Django related tests, which the LLM vendors care very deeply about keeping their scores up. Also, Django's docs are excellent, so strategically pointing an LLM to them in a prompt can often produce great results…

Django is the only thing I've used where I've vibe-coded an app, then looked at the code and not been appalled.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#72

Post by contingencies »

nomel wrote: post #7
NickNaraghi wrote: post #3

> Let’s say every company gets about three innovation tokens. You can spend these however you want, but the supply is fixed for a long while. This is one of my favorite blog posts, and it can basically be encapsulated in the idea of "innovation tokens." It is one of the most useful concepts I have had as a PM / eng leader in my career. It helps actually make the the right tradeoffs, and helps even more in explaining…

There was another, much older, post similar to this about, I think, "beans" that engineers use to solve problems. If I remember correctly, it was something like, solving a problem costs "beans", and engineers will always use most all of their "beans" to solve a given problem, because it's somewhat "easy" until you run out of them. Maybe it wasn't beans? But, I've been looking for it for years.

You misspelled 'beers'. A boring technology.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#73

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

iand675 wrote: post #67

Well, I've not tried to publish this on HN so far, but I guess given such a counterpoint, I should at least attempt to share: https://www.iankduncan.com/engineering/2026-08-07-getting-fr...

I'm reminded of my father in law, who when asked what superpower he'd want, it was flight, so he could get to work without waiting in traffic.

If all of your employees are AI's, clarity of vision trumps choosing boring. And if you're having boring visions... well the world is already full of competition for you, so good luck I guess.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#74

Post by devin »

andai wrote: post #10
conrs wrote: post #8

Love this post. Surprisingly controversial; it hasn't made me very many engineering friends.

It's bad for building your resume. Managers and employees are rewarded for popular thing. Popularity is mostly a function of novelty. So the (social and therefore economic) incentive structure is inversely correlated with choosing boring technology.

Try to explain that part of an imagined "Agentic AI Everything" product being built would be cheaper and more efficient as a simple function call. Good luck!

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#75

Post by clueless »

I remember reading this back in 2015, but how is this not just the age old conservative (don't do more than needed) vs progressives (lets try some new risk things) debate? As much as I can relate to a more conservative choice when choosing tech that might power a giant consumer company, sometimes using riskier tech in a startup makes more sense to get the real innovation flowing... and the idea of "Choose New Technology, Sometimes" just feels like a little cheat to get away from the bigger issue with the overall thesis. In this way, the idea in this blog just feels so out of touch.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#76

Post by mr_toad »

i_like_robots wrote: post #29
insanitybit wrote: post #19

I'll push back against this, despite it being so popular. I dislike the arbitrary "innovation tokens" and I think this entire concept really blurs the lines and feels sort of unserious. Engineers should understand requirements, risks, tradeoffs, and potential gains. New technology may be right for that. Novel approaches may be right for that. "Novel" or "New" are only proxies and they're weak. For example, I may thin…

I see innovation as a guardrail against CV driven development. More, I think you need to consider the context of when this was written. It was a period of rapid innovation/evolution - I remember more than a handful of projects failing (either undelivered or rewritten well under their expected lifecycle) around this time because teams had taken bets on new tech either they didn't know how to use well or the tech didn'…

My recollection is that MongoDB was based on CouchDB, except they dispensed with Erlang & JSON and went with more conventional technology.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#78

Post by Gormo »

insanitybit wrote: post #27
bravura wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"boring" means familiar. It should have more known unknowns than unknown unknowns.

So then say that.

The article does say that. Explicitly. It's even got a picture of Donald Rumsfeld to help drive the point home.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#79

Post by jay_kyburz »

euthymiclabs wrote: post #4

Software that works year-after-year has never been a commodity. It's boring on the surface. It doesn't get the flashy posts. But I'll choose reliable over new in almost all cases.

This is why it took me so long before giving Go a try, even though on paper it sounds exactly what I want from a language.

I'm glad I finally did, I've been enjoying it.

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