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Choose Boring Technology (2015)

boringtechnology.club

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Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#91
The way I see it is that one should master their stack. If you work over and over again with the same stack you will know it well. You will be able to move mountains with it. But it takes years to arrive to that. It takes implementing multiple projects the same way over and over again.

You need the wherewithal to stick with your stack and not get lured away. Maybe this is what boring means. Maybe boring is different to different engineers based on their background.

Sometimes you cannot select the stack cause there might be more senior engineers at a company and they have more sway. This is fine as long as the engineers picking the stack have picked a stack they have mastered and it is boring to them. As a regular engineer in their team I would hope to rely on their expertise and would hope to learn from them.

I remember at one job a rogue engineer picked a boring backend that would have been fine. But they fell behind because the other engineers knew their boring stack a lot better. Ultimately the rogue engineer had to switch to the other boring stack. The rogue engineer just was not fast enough to master it and implement the features required to keep pace with the demands of management. These demands were trace centralized logging, security, and of course features. So while they were still learning the ropes, we were moving on to even more advanced security, logging, and feature requirements. They just couldn't keep up.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#92

I 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…

You are clearly not a JavaScript developer. It really feels like everybody has just given up and thrown in the towel. There are no good developers, let some giant monster framework make all your decisions, and frequently chase shiny shit. Of course this means starting over, from scratch, in small sections of the product every couple of years. > The industry constantly mints senior engineers who have been bitten by co…

I'm not used to see that amount of hate directed to fellow programmers in a hn comment.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#93

The way I see it is that one should master their stack. If you work over and over again with the same stack you will know it well. You will be able to move mountains with it. But it takes years to arrive to that. It takes implementing multiple projects the same way over and over again. You need the wherewithal to stick with your stack and not get lured away. Maybe this is what boring means. Maybe boring is different…

I agree completely. Another angle that is less common is remaining at one company you believe and respects your work. If you find somewhere like that, years of working in the same domain can make you more effective. Not to speak of the advantages of a team that works together for 5+ years and the power that comes from true camradarie with your team mates.

It's sad that most places - and by definition the largest places also - end up being a meat grinder and people just hop companies and teams within companies every year or two. By the time you start understanding the domain you move on. It takes years to internalize a problem and understand it deeply.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially when he said that some people did have to work on that setup to scale it up. Sounds like devops work, so the same would have happened with redis, right?

He covers this - the operational setup & expertise to scale Memcached already existed because Etsy already used it elsewhere. It would have had to be built and learned (mostly) separately for Redis.

I meant the part where he talks about maintenance later on.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#95

I 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…

I had a small business depending on the Etsy API during the time they transitioned some storage to Mongo. The immediate effect for us was a downturn in functionality and reliability with no apparent advantages. In the midst of other serious concerns about their direction, we questioned why Etsy was doing this on the API mailing list and were told basically we didn't know what we were talking about and it wasn't out b…

I am left maintaining a mongo db from 7 years ago or so, when NoSQL was peak hype cycle. Like you say it´s crap.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#96

I 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…

I don’t do “boring,” as much as I do “mature and robust.” I like shipping products, as opposed to just “writing” them, and shipping is boring. Lots of annoying intricacies and processes. I’m writing a fairly large-scale app, right now. It’s written in Swift (frontend), using IB (classic UIKit), and PHP/MySQL/Postgres (backend). It does not use SwiftUI (shiny), or Rust (shiny, but a bit more dusty), or some form of No…

Why 2 DBs?

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#97
post #34
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

What's wrong with Node.js? It's super mainstream now. We have it in production since years, I see a LOT of companies migrating from everything else to node since years and it's a growing trend from what I see at my level with startups and even enterprises

The language for one. There are decent choices of language for backend work. Why anyone would choose JavaScript is beyond me.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#98
I have dreadful stories about the amount of technical debt my team has faced because of one hedonist developer. He was good, but he had failed to understand the beauty of a boring stack. He kept reinventing the wheel, and over-engineering every part of the project. Keeping this in mind, I only pick shiny new tech if it achieves a superficial task, is fast to implement, and can be replaced easily.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Startups are more commonly on python/ruby/node/php. It's faster to start with and to iterate. Java and .Net are more common in longer-lived, larger projects, or when performance matters.

and where maintainability and tco matter

I think maintainability is mostly down to developer skill and the ability to abstract to the right level. A good Python dev will likely leave far more maintainable code than an average Java dev.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are clearly not a JavaScript developer. It really feels like everybody has just given up and thrown in the towel. There are no good developers, let some giant monster framework make all your decisions, and frequently chase shiny shit. Of course this means starting over, from scratch, in small sections of the product every couple of years. > The industry constantly mints senior engineers who have been bitten by co…

I'm not used to see that amount of hate directed to fellow programmers in a hn comment.

There is no hate in that comment, just criticism.
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