Choose Boring Technology (2015)
boringtechnology.club
Choose Boring Technology (2015)
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Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)
#2I always found it funny that companies will go to extreme Herculean lengths to hire the best programmers, and are incredibly fearful and paranoid that they could be making a "bad hire", and yet once hired they don't spend a second making sure engineers aren't completely running the software product off the rails and killing the company internally. The author mentions trying to rewrite Etsy's backend in Scala and MongoDB. That probably cost the company X million dollars. Etsy could still be recovering from that.
The industry constantly mints senior engineers who have been bitten by complexity, but doesn't want to hire them, or listen to them. More often than not senior engineers pretend to be excited about complecting the tech stack, because hey, it pads their resume with the latest buzzwords and they've given up trying to fight against it anyway.
The last line of defense against a rogue engineering team is managers who have studied this stuff. How many engineering managers can spot the common situation "the engineers are bored and they're rewriting perfectly-good codebases in Common Lisp and OCAML for funsies"? And how many know what to do about it when they see it?
Anyway, this is a cool website, and it'll be useful to point people to it in the future, so thanks for that.
Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)
#3Generalizations like “choose boring technology” are just unhelpful slogans.
Truth is you should choose technology given consideration of its pros and cons, not on the basis of some slogan.
There are very good reasons to use mature technologies and very good reasons to use current technologies and very good reasons to use absolute cutting edge technologies.
When someone comes at your approach wielding a slogan, be skeptical.
Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)
#4I still think the Simplicity Chapter in the Google SRE book sums this up best
Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)
#5The problem with the non-boring technology club is that programmers see what problem FAANG companies are solving and wanting to be on the edge on new technology too. But they don‘t have the same problems. Another problem is they want to show what they can do. If they tell in an interview they are working with rails/django and a postgresql database they fear they look incompetent using those old technologies. So they try to convince their companies their products need to be rewritten in mongodb, react with graphql in a micro service stack and many more state of the art technologies.
And in the end many developer years are wasted just rewriting a working an existing software in a new stack they are not yet comfortable with and the new product is much less stable than the old one.
I love basecamp for their hotwired stack and showing that you can make the great software with old boring technologies and just a little bit of javascript magic pixie dust.
Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)
#6Generalizations like “choose boring technology” are just unhelpful slogans. Truth is you should choose technology given consideration of its pros and cons, not on the basis of some slogan. There are very good reasons to use mature technologies and very good reasons to use current technologies and very good reasons to use absolute cutting edge technologies. When someone comes at your approach wielding a slogan, be ske…
I generally agree about slogans, but that seems unfair here. "Choose Boring Technology" isn't the sum total of the content, it's essentially the title. If you read past it, there is good stuff.
Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)
#7previous discussion (348 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20323246
Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)
#8Generalizations like “choose boring technology” are just unhelpful slogans. Truth is you should choose technology given consideration of its pros and cons, not on the basis of some slogan. There are very good reasons to use mature technologies and very good reasons to use current technologies and very good reasons to use absolute cutting edge technologies. When someone comes at your approach wielding a slogan, be ske…
> When someone comes at your approach wielding a slogan, be skeptical.
I do agree. Although the point of the article is to _lean_ more on "boring technology" side of, and paying extra effort when considering adopting newest flashy things.
Having read the article 3-4 time in the last years, I don't think they say "don't use new things", just "not too many new things at the same time"
Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)
#9The redis/memcache example doesn't make a lot of sense to me, unless the idea is that a separate memcache instance is deployed alongside each backend, while redis would have been a single instance.
I'm all for boring technology; reimplementing web protocols and semantics in JS is a disaster - and would probably have made a clearer case study than comparing to memory-first database caches.
Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)
#10Generalizations like “choose boring technology” are just unhelpful slogans. Truth is you should choose technology given consideration of its pros and cons, not on the basis of some slogan. There are very good reasons to use mature technologies and very good reasons to use current technologies and very good reasons to use absolute cutting edge technologies. When someone comes at your approach wielding a slogan, be ske…
> When someone comes at your approach wielding a slogan, be skeptical. I do agree. Although the point of the article is to _lean_ more on "boring technology" side of, and paying extra effort when considering adopting newest flashy things. Having read the article 3-4 time in the last years, I don't think they say "don't use new things", just "not too many new things at the same time"
Perhaps the title should be “err on the side of boring technologies”, although I don’t even agree with that. The right technologies for a project are the ones you deem to be right, given appropriate consideration of many factors. Your project may really need to use all beta release software, cause maybe it just does.