This has to be the worst website to get the most basic information. Talk about over-engineering.
Choose Boring Technology (2015)
41–50 of 374 posts
Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)
#42So, what would be a best boring backend stack today? The one mentioned in the article? Or java for python?
Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)
#43This is one of those posts where you can really feel the value of senior engineering/previous experience.
I definitely have not approached choosing a new technology with the velocity vs. maintenance trade off, instead just choosing the technology best fit for the job at hand. But when looking at a system holistically, this may not be the best choice. It’ll be good to at least know to consider this in the future (although I’ll admittedly probably still bias towards “fun” technologies).
Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)
#44previous discussion (348 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20323246
Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)
#45Urgh, this feels familiar. Last year I left a company that was just wrapping up a new tech product, everything was microservices and mongodb. Trying to get a simple answer out of the engineering team about something as trivial as “how can I get a list of customers who have purchased product X” was almost impossible. They sure had fun building it though.
What does that even remotely have to do with micro-services or MongoDB ? If your query was exposed as a REST API you could have easily accessed it via a micro-service. And MongoDB has a pretty powerful and easy to use query language. I could've answered your query in about 5s. Sounds more like a business or process limitation.
Just a generalised frustration that the technology team didn’t seem to understand how the rest of the business needed the technology to behave.
The reality is you don’t need that sort of query exposed as an API, but you do need that data to be exported regularly into a CRM and marketing automation tools.
Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)
#46I can understand this from the perspective of a manager or company owner. "Happiness comes from shipping products" or "Choose boring technology" make a lot of sense if you are maximizing profit and don't need to work with the tech yourself. If you are an engineer and you want to try a new technology, go for it. Even if it doesn't make sense. Learn new things, don't stick with the boring tech. Maximize your own happin…
Totally, one can understand both sides.
In my opinion, it also works in the other direction, where the managers push things onto the developers. "Can we use this blockchain thing?", "we need to do AI", "we should use this cross platform mobile app tool I heard and read 3 minutes about".
Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)
#47Really good presentation. Even in this form. These are the best arguments for choosing Boring Tech that I’ve seen yet.
Almost gave me a sinking feeling:
> If you behave that way you miss out on the part of the curve that we call “mastery.” That’s a state to the right on this curve, where there are still problems. Everything still sucks but it feels manageable.
> The grim paradox of this law of software is that you should probably be using the tool that you hate the most. You hate it because you know the most about it.
Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)
#48I 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 Mong…
> The last line of defense against a rogue engineering team is managers who have studied this stuff. If your engineering team is the one pushing in that direction I'd reckon the company was in a bad spot to begin with to have hired that team because it strongly indicates that the management layer (head of tech/CTO) has no technical clue. Hire strong Lead Developers with a proven track record of delivering value to co…
and Java?
Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)
#49I 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 Mong…
How about “leaves the industry rather than have to use terrible things at dumb companies”, thus giving a survival bias that selects for shiny. I know I feel that way about a lot of stuff now.
One of the most relatable posts I've ever seen on HN. Same reason I'm working towards getting out.
Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)
#50I enjoy reading this each time it gets posted but can we please get TLS enabled? It's so easy these days.