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Choose Boring Technology (2015)

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Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#121

Post by jason_oster »

This advice holds up, but there are caveats to keep in mind. Two off the top of my head:

1. I once worked for a company that had a large Cassandra cluster that was primarily serving the role of a distributed append-only log. This role is as perfect a fit for Cassandra as I can imagine. When we needed a distributed database for authentication, we decided to use Cassandra for it since we had in-house expertise (it was "boring technology") and a cluster we could piggy-back on for a while. When we needed a distributed database for a key-value service, we used the same reasoning and chose Cassandra again. There were many problems with Cassandra that I won't go into, but I will say that straying too far from Cassandra's comfort zone stretched it to a breaking point. And we had some downtime and rough nights because of it. Sometimes boring technology isn't enough, you also need boring workloads for it.

2. I was an early adopter for Rust. Before 1.0, it wasn't clear to most people whether the language would mount to anything. To me, I saw a formal proof assistant being put into programmer's hands and could tell right away it had a bright future. Rust was not a boring technology back then. You might say it is now (for some use cases). Adopting shiny new technologies that measurably improve confidence is not a risk. What's foolish is getting comfortable and complacent with familiar, aka boring, technologies that are difficult to use correctly.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#122

Post by t-writescode »

Pannoniae wrote: post #109
theptip wrote: post #9

I love this post. It’s also interesting to revisit in the age of agents. Using the language of the article, I’d say “push all your innovation tokens into agents” is probably a good move. This means the tech your agents work with should all be boring tech. Another way of saying this is “use in-distribution technology”. If agents are substantially better at Rust than Zig, probably you should use Rust, even if Zig is “b…

I admit I have a hard time following this logic. If an agent has a baseline intelligence, you can... instead of using boring technology, just DIY/NIH the simplest custom solution which fulfills your requirements. And you'll usually do a better job than a general-purpose software library. Even if in the other approach, the LLM knows the stack better, you're just going to push the complexity into your client code, so i…

That’s definitely not true, and I’ll give two incredibly common examples:

1: arraylist. A library will probably do better than you. It’s already written and common.

2: webservers. Sure, you can write one yourself with sockets and a bunch of buffers and string management… or, you could use one of the 100s of existing ones. Which one? Probably a stable and established one.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#123

Post by jason_oster »

Animats wrote: post #98
dwedge wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a total tangent but AI being so good at developing rust means that my first impression of seeing a rust project has totally changed. 4 or 5 years ago if I had to weigh up two options and one was written in rust it was almost a sure thing that the program was snappy, fast, reliable and that the author was competant. Now it's a sure fire sign that the project was probably vibe coded. Not saying it can't still be g…

> Now it's a sure fire sign that the project was probably vibe coded. Groan. That's sad.

Compare to what happened to Python. That will cheer you up!

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#124

Post by jason_oster »

simonw wrote: post #58
insanitybit wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I obviously don't agree that it's useful as a communication tool though. Why not "Use the technology that's appropriate for our use case"? That seems radically better and doesn't suffer from weird misinterpretations or vague terms.

Because people LOVE COMING UP with excuses to try a new technology under the basis that "this is appropriate for our use-case", and if you don't introduce a concept similar to innovation tokens you may find that six months later your project is combining three different unproven new technologies and doesn't actually work yet. Encouraging your team to be selective in where they place their new bets - and use "boring"…

It does happen, but having the ability to pivot quickly is almost always more valuable than dealing with "the devil you know".

There is nothing wrong with evaluating something new and discovering it doesn't work out as expected. That's still a meaningful outcome. Try it, if it doesn't work, replace it. You've learned something in the process, and it's a mistake you won't make again.

At some point you have to trust in the scientific method. The hypothesis->test->evaluate->adjust hypothesis cycle hasn't been beaten for thousands of years.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#126

Post by asa400 »

leetrout wrote: post #21
martythemaniak wrote: post #17

The problem with this is that the list of tech that gets boring changes all time, faster than people's opinions. Kubernetes is very boring tech, but if you go through the old discussion threads on this (even from the last year or two), Kubernetes is still cited as some brand new wizbang thing you shouldn't spend tokens on.

Over 12 years of popular usage at this point. I still think it's inappropriate for ~90% of the companies using it.

Apologies in advance this turned in to a bit of a rant of violent agreement.

For most places k8s is a complete boat anchor. Ends up being a huge complication and sap on product momentum. Can’t tell you how many outages I’ve seen from k8s misconfiguration and misunderstanding.

In no world would I consider k8s to be boring, I can’t understand how all of these shops have convinced themselves that k8s specifically is the level of abstraction at which they want to be interacting with their infrastructure.

I think k8s happens because a large number of devs look at Heroku-like platforms and bristle at the notion that they could ever be expected to intentionally constrain their brilliant system designs into preexisting, Heroku-style shapes. It’s ego on some level.

That, and a ton engineers are still incredibly bad at trading off hardware cost and compensation/complexity/organizational cost. “Heroku will cost us $2000/month, running k8s on our own hardware will only cost $400/month.” Ok, but your team’s total comp is costing the company on the order of $1MM/year. Is saving $1,600/month on infrastructure to spend $20k/month on dev time a good deal? This happens all the freaking time, it’s crazy how little devs value their own time.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#127

Post by tshaddox »

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…

I like the general concept, but I think framing it as a small number of discrete tokens isn't quite right. I'd treat the whole thing in terms of debt and risk. Using "non-boring" technology [0] is really just subtracting some amount from your balance. You don't want your balance to go too negative, but carrying some debt is sometimes fine. And some risky bets might turn out to have a huge ROI!

The amounts clearly aren't discrete. Writing your entire app on a new language runtime might be very risky (and also might have large potential ROI!), but choosing a new email provider might not be (random example, but presuming that you can swap out providers fairly easily).

[0] My bigger complaint is really about the vagueness of even deciding what is "boring." How does a new technology transition from being "non-boring" to being "boring"? Apparently that requires a lot of people to ignore this article's advice for a long time, until we collectively decide that those people have had good enough results to consider that technology "boring."

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#128

Post by cliche »

I wish there was a jobs board for companies that are somehow vetted for this type of engineering culture.

So many jobs are sold as “we’re pragmatist's” and when you show up there’s 5 devs, 50 repos and most of the work is discussing if x requirement should be a new micro service. The product is usually an web app with 10 entities and and an API.

Suppose it’s keeping people in jobs

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#129

Post by nomel »

bch wrote: post #120
nomel wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m vaguely recalling something - and I think the beans might’ve also represented vetos, so one had a limited number of objections to other people’s ideas… quick search revealing nothing so far, though.

Sounds familiar! I believe it was a simple html page hosted on some university user page.

I've tried over the years, but can never find it. All the search engines moving to vector search makes finding something like this near impossible.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#130

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

dylan604 wrote: post #117
jonahx wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. That is tragically sad.

It's better than saying invisibility as that always leads to someone being creepy. Laser beam eyes is of limited use. Moving through walls seems kind of meh to me as that's not a really limiting factor in my day to day. Shooting webs from my writs maybe kind of cool, but if its main use is for moving around it is much more limited than just being able to fly. Lasso of truth isn't really a super power but an interesti…

Telekinesis strikes me as the most practically useful. How often I have yearned for a third hand to hold something at a tricky angle. Depending on how fine of control you get, you can also heat/cool matter.

Flight -is it as hard as running? Can I fly faster than I run? Do I get a force field or will I be constantly eating bugs?

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