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Choose Boring Technology (2015)

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Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#141

Post by inigyou »

rienbdj wrote: post #92
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #73

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. 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.

It’s easier to imagine a super power than the end of capitalism, apparently.

It's famously easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#142

Post by sgarland »

tshaddox wrote: post #127
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 ar…

From TFA:

“The nice thing about boringness (so constrained) is that the capabilities of these things are well understood. But more importantly, their failure modes are well understood.”

Boring technology is that where you have an extremely small amount of “I didn’t think that was possible” events occurring. As it states, there’s always some; SQLite’s recent WAL-Reset bug that Tailscale discovered is a perfect example of that.

Actually, on the subject of databases, I think they all break that rule. I’m a DBRE, and can readily state there are an insane number of footguns with all of them. It’s just that, relative to other options, they’re as good as you’re going to get. Also in their defense, nearly every footgun I’ve ever encountered was documented, it’s just that the docs are incredibly dense, and sometimes a bit vague.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#143

Post by samtheprogram »

sgarland wrote: post #137
monk_grilla wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also broadly agree with the post. > If you choose to write your website in NodeJS, you just spent one of your innovation tokens. Is NodeJS still considered on the same level of "unknown" / "not-boring" technology as the others listed? By my reckoning it is plenty mature enough to be considered a "boring" choice, and going for bun would be spending and innovation token.

I think calling anything in the JavaScript ecosystem “mature” is a bit of a stretch. This is the same community that brought us left-pad.

That's an insane take. Anything?!?

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#144

Post by selcuka »

monk_grilla wrote: post #135
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 also broadly agree with the post. > If you choose to write your website in NodeJS, you just spent one of your innovation tokens. Is NodeJS still considered on the same level of "unknown" / "not-boring" technology as the others listed? By my reckoning it is plenty mature enough to be considered a "boring" choice, and going for bun would be spending and innovation token.

NodeJS is just an example that must have seemed reasonable to the author at the time this blog post was written (11 years ago). Obviously it may no longer apply.

Also the definitions of "unknown" and "boring" are always up to you. If you have a bunch of experienced `bun` developers in your company you may consider it as the boring tech.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#145

Post by insanitybit »

jonahx wrote: post #110
insanitybit wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CV driven development is just as well guarded against by asking someone to justify their technical decisions based on the requirements and how the solution meets them. So "boring" does nothing to further that. > More, I think you need to consider the context of when this was written. It was a period of rapid innovation/evolution It's linked today, people feel it's relevant today. This isn't a historic piece about how…

> CV driven development is just as well guarded against by asking someone to justify their technical decisions based on the requirements and how the solution meets them. So "boring" does nothing to further that. It doesn't though. It's very easy to manufacture reasons why "shiny new thing" is the objectively right fit for something, even when it's not. The word "boring" is well-chosen because it's addressing a bias m…

Replacing one bias with another feels silly, I can justify bad decisions just as well either way. Just have real discussions about the technical merits, not that crazy of an idea.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#146

Post by chrysoprace »

monk_grilla wrote: post #135
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 also broadly agree with the post. > If you choose to write your website in NodeJS, you just spent one of your innovation tokens. Is NodeJS still considered on the same level of "unknown" / "not-boring" technology as the others listed? By my reckoning it is plenty mature enough to be considered a "boring" choice, and going for bun would be spending and innovation token.

I think that in 2026 Node is a boring technology, but with the fast-moving ecosystem around it if you opt into npm (the registry, not the package manager) it makes it not boring.

The things you layer on top of Node via npm could count as "not-boring" in this instance, especially with the number of supply-chain attacks each month.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#147

Post by insanitybit »

i_like_robots wrote: post #66
insanitybit wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree with the article though and I dislike the influence it has had. I have seen engineers use "Boring" to justify "I know this technology" for situations where that technology is a bad fit. Conversations about technical solutions are bespoke, there is no one term that can or should be used to guide them.

Poor choices whether influenced by this article or engineers chasing CV points are no different. Boring technology is a tool or communication device like any other. I hope in your situation you were able to influence the engineers utilising it poorly to reconsider.

The point is exactly that - bad decisions happen when your reasoning is based on silly terms like "boring" or "hyped" or whatever. The solution is to discuss the merits of each solution as it pertains to the problem space, which "boring" does not help with (and obfuscates).

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#148

Post by firesteelrain »

inigyou wrote: post #139
t-writescode wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How many times has the stable and established X surprised you with some unexpected behavior? Once upon a time I wanted a URL /like/this/with%2Fslashes/ where a path parameter could, in rare cases, contain an encoded slash. Legit according to every RFC I checked. Works fine in browsers. But I couldn't get the web server to not convert it to a / before hitting my code. And woe betide thee who wants to make nginx return…

RFC 3986 treats %2F as a reserved character that behavior becomes app specific.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#149

Post by insanitybit »

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"…

People also love coming up with any way to use Postgres or whatever thing they're already familiar with and they get to say "it's boring" like that means anything.

> Encouraging your team to be selective in where they place their new bets - and use "boring" aka already-understood technology for the bits that are not going to help solve unique problems - can help avoid expensive mistakes.

Or just encourage your team to have rational discussions about technical choices, how is this controversial?

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#150

Post by simonw »

insanitybit wrote: post #149
simonw wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"…

People also love coming up with any way to use Postgres or whatever thing they're already familiar with and they get to say "it's boring" like that means anything. > Encouraging your team to be selective in where they place their new bets - and use "boring" aka already-understood technology for the bits that are not going to help solve unique problems - can help avoid expensive mistakes. Or just encourage your team t…

The boring technology framing is meant to provide a hook to help people "have rational discussions about technical choices". It's a tool for inspiring conversation.
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