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Choose Boring Technology

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Re: Choose Boring Technology

#171

Post by Daishiman »

xwdv wrote: post #86

There’s a certain amount of ladder kicking involved in telling people to choose boring and beige technologies after you started up your career chasing after new and exciting shiny things. Every developer should spend some time working at the bleeding edge, so they know how it feels to get cut. The best time is absolutely at the beginning, when you’re a fresh grad and have the energy. You have the rest of your life to…

There's a difference between bold technology and new technology.

A lot of new tech is shiny and provides legitimately useful benefits. Think the new wave of frameworks that started with Rails and Django.

There's a lot of shiny tech that has been a gigantic waste of everyone's time, like MongoDB and people trying to shoehorn MapReduce into every possible computation.

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#172

Post by c0vfefe »

regularfry wrote: post #163
pif wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Happiness comes from shipping stuff" Actually, the rest of your comments points to: "Happiness comes from shipping good stuff"

"The way to ship good stuff is to ship lots of stuff and keep the good bits" - apologies to Linus Pauling

Or perhaps to build lots of stuff, and only ship the good bits.

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#173

Post by c0vfefe »

fogetti wrote: post #161
xwdv wrote: post #86

There’s a certain amount of ladder kicking involved in telling people to choose boring and beige technologies after you started up your career chasing after new and exciting shiny things. Every developer should spend some time working at the bleeding edge, so they know how it feels to get cut. The best time is absolutely at the beginning, when you’re a fresh grad and have the energy. You have the rest of your life to…

The problem is that those people who chose shiny new technology only see the benefit, while all the others in the company will rot in hell because of the stupid choice of a junior engineer (who jumped ships 3 times meanwhile). I don't see how does that benefit the company? The whole point of the article is that you should make wise technology decisions which benefits the whole organization.

> while all the others in the company will rot in hell because of the stupid choice of a junior engineer

If a team's management can't prevent this from happening, then they've got bigger problems to worry about.

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#175

Post by csours »

oftenwrong wrote: post #58

Always glad to see this making the rounds, as it has been influential for me, especially the perspective of "Happiness comes from shipping stuff". I often think about this part, in particular: >Then we walked away. We didn’t do anything related to activity feeds for years after that. We barely even thought about it. >Then one day I said, “hey, I wonder how activity feeds is doing.” And I looked at it and was surprise…

Yesterday reviewed my first script that went global about 8 years ago. I think it had one update from my original deployment. =)

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#176

Post by c0vfefe »

undreren wrote: post #61
crispyambulance wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Code is not "a liability". It is a tool that can be used masterfully or utterly abused. Every craftsman has to invest in their tools. And for someone to truly master their craft they must sometimes hone their tool skills speculatively, without short-term gain, and by sacrificing the time and attention used for other things, like actual projects. If everyone just obeyed their project manager and always focused 100% on…

Code absolutely is a liability. It is not a tool, it's a means to an end. A simple tool, like a hammer, is not volatile over time. The house that you build with your tools is. It will weaken and rot, and given enough time it will crumble. It takes care and maintenance to keep it safe to live in. It is the same with code in production; at some point in time in the future, through no fault of your own, the code can bec…

> It is not a tool, it's a means to an end.

You could almost call it "something (such as an instrument or apparatus) used in performing an operation."[0]

[0]https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tool

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#177

Post by gfodor »

xwdv wrote: post #86

There’s a certain amount of ladder kicking involved in telling people to choose boring and beige technologies after you started up your career chasing after new and exciting shiny things. Every developer should spend some time working at the bleeding edge, so they know how it feels to get cut. The best time is absolutely at the beginning, when you’re a fresh grad and have the energy. You have the rest of your life to…

Surely what you state here can be said of any advice given due to experience. As long as the natural inclinations of younger developers push up against said advice, it's completely sane to give it. Because without it, young developers will have an incomplete mental model, and will lack the intellectual tools to potentially make better choices early in their career.

Also it seems to miss the point somewhat: choosing 'boring' technology has little to do with working on things that are unfulfilling. On the contrary, when tech stack choices are the thing from which developers derive their excitement from, in my view, it's often "empty calories" masking the lack of "emotional nutrition" they are getting from the problem they are solving or the users they are serving. For every whiz-bang neural network getting users to click on ads, there's a 'boring' embedded system running on an ancient C framework somewhere putting satellites in space. I'd rather work on the latter any day of the week.

As Hamming said, "if you're not working on the most important problem in your field, why not?"

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#178

Post by c0vfefe »

jasode wrote: post #65
Erlich_Bachman wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the real world with limited resources, limited skills, limited budgets and limited brain power, yes code is a liability. Not only a liability, but a liability among other things.

>In the real world with limited resources, limited skills, limited budgets and limited brain power, yes code is a liability. That's an unbalanced conclusion. Code can be a liability but it can also be an asset . Do we have limited resources? Maybe writing new code can help. E.g. In cars, the electronic fuel injectors have computer code determining the optimal amount of gas to inject to minimize fuel usage. Fuel effic…

> That's an unbalanced conclusion. Code can be a liability but it can also be an asset.

maybe that's why he said:

> Not only a liability, but a liability among other things.

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#179

Post by [deleted] »

endymi0n wrote: post #15
tw1010 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

History is filled with re-discovery and explanation of things that were blindingly obvious to the generation that came before.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." ― George Santayana "I've got news for Mr. Santayana: we're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive." ― Kurt Vonnegut

[deleted]

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#180

Post by Crinus »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #63
Crinus wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, in 1974 when the new Altair 8800 made the cover of Popular Electronics[2], an excited Paul Allen showed the magazine to a 19-year old Bill Gates. The "boring tech" advocates would tell them they're wasting their time with the "new fad of microcomputers" and they should look at boring IBM 360 mainframes instead. I remember reading a book around the late 90s (the book was written in the early 90s) about…

That's a false analogy, because the micro was a category changer. It was literally the basis of entire new markets. A lot of people saw that coming. A lot of other people - like DEC and DG - didn't. IBM mostly didn't, but was lucky enough to have a small division that did in spite of the culture around it. (And they lost it. Too bad.) Node, Mongo, Clojure, etc were never category changers - they were solutions made b…

I'm not commenting on the analogy, my comment was specifically the part i quoted since it sounded to me like the poster assumed it was how "boring tech advocates" would react: i confirmed that this is exactly how they reacted.

Outside of that i sit on the fence of "it depends" with a bias towards conservatism. After all I do mostly write desktop software in C and (Free) Pascal, i do not care about web development at all, i see smartphones as a neat distraction but overall having done more harm than good to the stuff i like (desktop software and UX, primarily) and of all the new languages popping up here and there i find Go the most interesting (i'd also have an interest towards D but Free Pascal provides pretty much everything i'd need from D outside of the crazy metaprogramming, which i'm not sure it is a good thing in the long term).

Ok, actually i might sit a bit further towards conservatism than i initially thought :-P.

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