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Choose Boring Technology (2015)

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Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#321

Post by real-dino »

BigJono wrote: post #184
austincheney wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been writing it full time about 13 years. I love writing in this language, and TypeScript even more. I am just frustrated by what appears to be some combination of insecurity, false expertise, and a vehement lack of passion in the work force. If I want to be happy I should move on to a different technology stack, but I really enjoy making products in this language.

It's funny, I have about 13 years experience, have been senior in both enterprise, start-ups and everything in-between, and have basically the exact same view about front end dev as your original post. Except I fucking hate using Typescript, and totally wasn't expecting to see you mention you like it, given all the other stuff. IME all the same people that overengineer everything with god awful dependencies are the s…

I've used typed languages before (C#), and I've used Javascript for 8 or so year, and yep, I too can't see what the hell Typescript brings.

I also used Haxe, which was a similar typed language, that compiles down to Javascript, and writing typed language for an untyped environment was an exercise in frustration.

It's almost like the React trend to write CSS in javascript. It separates the end result from the code even more, and doesn't really get you anything other than the typescript tax.

Maybe one day I will have that aha moment and get it, but the only real reason I see to learn Typescript is if the industry deems it essential to learn.

One of my favourite things about Javascript is how expressive you can be in it. Some of the new ES6 stuff helps with this too, but at the point when you write Typescript, you might as well be writing in a whole different language.

But naturally every typescript fan has a few stories about 'type-safety' saved their bacon, and no stories about how they struggled with defining types for callback functions or getting everything scaffolded for hours.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#323

Post by [deleted] »

corytheboyd wrote: post #163
wffurr wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for summarizing the talk so concisely. Maybe read it before commenting next time. I wish HN had a feature where it could detect that you clicked the link and disallowed commenting before that. At the very least you’d have to click the link, even if you just immediately click back without reading, and you’d know what you were doing was circumventing the spirit of the place.

Interesting idea! Maybe instead of preventing you from commenting entirely, it just tagged all comments you leave as “have not read article”. I think the shame approach would actually work, but too many people would vehemently reject it for it to ever work.

[deleted]

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#324

Post by trestenhortz »

wffurr wrote: post #113
trestenhortz wrote: post #3

Generalizations 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…

Thanks for summarizing the talk so concisely. Maybe read it before commenting next time. I wish HN had a feature where it could detect that you clicked the link and disallowed commenting before that. At the very least you’d have to click the link, even if you just immediately click back without reading, and you’d know what you were doing was circumventing the spirit of the place.

“Choose Boring Technology” is an absolute statement. It’s a mantra. A meme. It demands you follow its lead.

It’s an order from the top. A commandment. A clear requirement. A statement of belief for the masses to follow.

It’s an unequivocal statement, a perfectly confident directive telling you precisely what to do without the slightest equivocation.

It’s not “read this powerful headline but then please read the in depth article only to find we don’t actually mean what is said in the headline, we mean something more nuanced and subtle why did you take our headline seriously?”

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#325

Post by rvba »

chrisco255 wrote: post #255
gravypod wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making efficient use if mongodb is very difficult but if you build your app and expectations correctly you can get something very performant. For example pre-4.x listing huge collections was unexpectedly extremely slow.

Yeah Mongo is 10 years old or so at this point. This article was written in 2015 about decisions made years earlier. It's now reached maturity and stability. It's now "boring tech".

Does mongoDB still use math.random to select 10% of errors and only report them, while 90% are ignored? Or did they correct this "behavior"?

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#326

Post by arcturus17 »

chrisco255 wrote: post #255
gravypod wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making efficient use if mongodb is very difficult but if you build your app and expectations correctly you can get something very performant. For example pre-4.x listing huge collections was unexpectedly extremely slow.

Yeah Mongo is 10 years old or so at this point. This article was written in 2015 about decisions made years earlier. It's now reached maturity and stability. It's now "boring tech".

It may be more established but it suffers from a similar problem: some people continue choosing it for the wrong reasons, such as "our backend is in JS, most of our devs only know JS, and it's easy to just dump objects in there", which is an abhorrent reason for choosing it, and will end up biting you.

IMO this would be a case where if you're dealing with a relational domain and the engineers really don't know SQL you should either (a) rethink your hiring policy or (b) spend one of your innovation tokens in having everyone learn SQL.

(I have to add the inevitable disclaimer that I actually love JS and do not want my words to be misinterpreted as a cheap dig at it)

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#327

Post by cutemonster »

tluyben2 wrote: post #249
Nextgrid wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the case of a lot of tech companies, the entire market is broken and leads to weird incentives rarely seen in any other industry: companies that aren’t profitable, don’t have a real product people pay for, don’t have a clear, plausible path to profitability and yet somehow stay in business because investors are happy to burn money. This completely reverses the typical market dynamics. The company is more focused o…

I often wonder why investors love paying 5 figure aws bills; even worse, why they consider lower bills or not using 'the cloud' a sign of cto incompetence. Even if the company can run on $500 hosting instead. Must be because it is easy to do DD on: AWS, check, TS (JS is now a reason to not pass VC dd I heard from friends) check , React check, microservices, check, etc.

DD = due diligence?

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#328

Post by wffurr »

trestenhortz wrote: post #324
wffurr wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for summarizing the talk so concisely. Maybe read it before commenting next time. I wish HN had a feature where it could detect that you clicked the link and disallowed commenting before that. At the very least you’d have to click the link, even if you just immediately click back without reading, and you’d know what you were doing was circumventing the spirit of the place.

“Choose Boring Technology” is an absolute statement. It’s a mantra. A meme. It demands you follow its lead. It’s an order from the top. A commandment. A clear requirement. A statement of belief for the masses to follow. It’s an unequivocal statement, a perfectly confident directive telling you precisely what to do without the slightest equivocation. It’s not “read this powerful headline but then please read the in de…

So a sufficiently compelling headline goes one step beyond intriguing your curiosity into clicking, it substitutes for the author's entire argument?

Amazing bit of self-justification you have there.

If you want to argue against what the author wrote, by all means. If you intend to argue against a straw man you have concocted out of a three word title, then you will seem a fool.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#329

Post by criddell »

atom_arranger wrote: post #317
deckard1 wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using React since 2014 or so. I can't speak for Angular or Vue, but I'm 100% sold on Svelte. It cuts out all of the crap that React and Redux introduced (lifecycles, hooks, boilerplate, etc.) and boils it all down to fundamentals. You can read the entire docs in a day and fully understand how everything fits together. I dare say it, but Svelte's docs are a breath of fresh air. It's rare that I read document…

I use a browser extension for checking out the tech stack of web apps. I haven't done it so much lately but a couple years ago whenever I would check an app with nice UX it was React, and if it was terrible UX it was Angular or something else. Also interested to see where Svelte will go. For my latest project I just didn't choose it because of lack of libraries.

I've been looking at this from a slightly different level. React may be the best choice for a UX on the web but I think it's still far worse than any native app. It's one of the reasons I get so disappointed after hearing about something cool and new and then finding out it's an Electron app.

I'm stuck on this idea that the best UX is a native app for performance reasons (responsiveness, memory, CPU, battery), aesthetic reasons (assuming your like your native platform) and longevity. On my desktop I often run applications that are a decade or more old. How many web apps rolling out today can sit untouched for the next decade and continue to do useful work?

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#330

Post by treeman79 »

aeternum wrote: post #271
tluyben2 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often wonder why investors love paying 5 figure aws bills; even worse, why they consider lower bills or not using 'the cloud' a sign of cto incompetence. Even if the company can run on $500 hosting instead. Must be because it is easy to do DD on: AWS, check, TS (JS is now a reason to not pass VC dd I heard from friends) check , React check, microservices, check, etc.

Not using the cloud has many hidden risks. You need multiple physical locations for reliability, those now need to be staffed. If you instead use cheaper 3rd party hosting companies, you may have hurdles to growth and future migration cost since those companies do not have many of the certifications required. From an investor POV, paying a little extra now is often worth it to reduce risk and remove barriers to explo…

Was part of a company that refused to use AWS.

We had migrate our servers 4 times as hosting company kept changing things, then getting purchased by IBM, then IBM was trying to figure itself out.

I didn’t kill the company, mostly due to a lot of really hard work. But it came close.

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