Choose Boring Technology (2015)

I feel like I've been pretty clear.

1. "Boring" is a bad term that obfuscates things that do not merit obfuscation. It's like saying "brb" in person instead of "I'll be back in 5 minutes" - "brb" means nothing to me, 30 seconds, 5 minutes, 30? And it saved you like 2 words? Silly, unserious, and fine for casual conversations but not for technical decisions like "what database do we use?".

2. It lets people lean into a bias. I see massive bias away from "hyped" tech. People on HN constantly condemn projects for being "hype" tech with no merit behind their criticism, or at least no expressed merit. It sounds very smart to say "oh that's just hyped" - this is a known bias that extends outside of tech. Calling something "boring" makes you sound smart but it doesn't convey information and it leads to the exact same decisions that "hype" would.

Having a conversation about technology is not hard. It's the job. It's one of the most important parts of the job. It is not worth papering over with some biased wording that is guilty of the same exact failure modes of the approach it attempts to deride.

This seems like the same phenomenon where desktop apps bundle a copy of Chromium.

I agree. Simple and effective.

I would add a third small machine to give HAProxy a third vote. The problem with only two machines is that, if communications between them fail, you don't want both believing the other died and doing the wrong thing. You could use that third machine for Postgres backups, which would be smart because Postgress replication is not the same as backup.

Why? What if doing 1 new thing saves you from having to do 3 old things? Why 2? Why 3?

> The post is written for an engineer at a startup as a reminder that although it’s green field development, you only have so much runway, so it’s better to focus on what matters instead of trying some new tech because it seems cool.

I am not suggesting that you do something "because it seems cool". I'm suggesting that you evaluate the costs and benefits of technology, and that "boring" is not sufficient nor helpful in that evaluation.

> Ideally. But I’ve worked with plenty of engineers who get far too excited by shiny new tech and overvalue its potential while undervaluing its risk.

I've worked with plenty of engineers who dismiss technology because it is "hyped" etc and then try to build systems on top of databases or other tools that were never designe for the use case and fail miserably.

The issue in both cases is engineers not evaluating solutions correctly. "Boring" will not help. I have literally been in a meeting where "boring" and "innovation" tokens were the justification for a technology choice that failed miserably. More than one!

> Yeah maybe, but unless you’re working on a problem that the tech directly solves, it’s pretty unlikely.

I'm not sure what you mean. There's is presumably some technical solution to the problem you want to solve.

> In 2015, MongoDB was a dumpster fire (which is still kind of true) and node.js was still kind of new and had enough rough edges that most teams were probably better off choosing some other language/framework.

I don't see why you couldn't justify not using Mongo or Node and then determine they aren't fits without saying "they aren't boring enough". In fact, I don't think either of those aren't boring in the sense that document databases/ nosql aren't particularly shocking concepts - the issue was, by far, the implementation.

> “Boring” and “simple” are ways to convey that it’s good to be risk averse.

They are very bad at this.

> It’s a bit of rhetorical flourish

I don't think rhetorical flourish should have much of a place in technical discussions. If you find yourself reaching for rhetorical flourish, you should ask yourself why you can't justify your position on its merits.

> choose what you work on carefully because you have limited runway and should spend that runway working on the problems that matter for your business, not new tech that’s orthogonal to it.

New technology may not be orthogonal to it, it may be critical.