> Let’s say every company gets about three innovation tokens. You can spend these however you want, but the supply is fixed for a long while.<p>This is one of my favorite blog posts, and it can basically be encapsulated in the idea of "innovation tokens." It is one of the most useful concepts I have had as a PM / eng leader in my career. It helps actually make the the right tradeoffs, and helps even more in explaining those tradeoffs to colleague of all levels. Highly recommend.
I also broadly agree with the post.<p>> If you choose to write your website in NodeJS, you just spent one of your innovation tokens.<p>Is NodeJS still considered on the same level of "unknown" / "not-boring" technology as the others listed? By my reckoning it is plenty mature enough to be considered a "boring" choice, and going for bun would be spending and innovation token.
I think that in 2026 Node is a boring technology, but with the fast-moving ecosystem around it if you opt into npm (the registry, not the package manager) it makes it not boring.<p>The things you layer on top of Node via npm could count as "not-boring" in this instance, especially with the number of supply-chain attacks each month.
NodeJS is just an example that must have seemed reasonable to the author at the time this blog post was written (11 years ago). Obviously it may no longer apply.<p>Also the definitions of "unknown" and "boring" are always up to you. If you have a bunch of experienced `bun` developers in your company you may consider it as the boring tech.
I think calling anything in the JavaScript ecosystem “mature” is a bit of a stretch. This is the same community that brought us left-pad.
It’s pretty boring at this point.
There was another, much older, post similar to this about, I think, "beans" that engineers use to solve problems. If I remember correctly, it was something like, solving a problem costs "beans", and engineers will always use most all of their "beans" to solve a given problem, because it's somewhat "easy" until you run out of them.<p>Maybe it wasn't beans? But, I've been looking for it for years.
I’m vaguely recalling something - and I think the beans might’ve also represented vetos, so one had a limited number of objections to other people’s ideas… quick search revealing nothing so far, though.
Not what you're after, but your talk of beans reminded me of Taco Bell Programming. [0]<p>[0] <a href="https://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2010/10/taco-bell-programming.html" rel="nofollow">https://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2010/10/taco-bell-progr...</a>
His example of a web crawler stinks. I can get behind the philosophy, but his specific web crawler example at a minimum needs to retry, respect robots.txt, and rate limit per domain. So no, xargs + curl is a dumb example.
Based on bot traffic to my personal blog over the past year or so, the minimum viable web crawler apparently does <i>not</i> need any of those things (much to my own personal annoyance, to be very clear).
Speaking of beans, here's a classic (totally different from the main topic. Welcome to Topic Creep):<p><a href="https://archive.uie.com/brainsparks/2011/07/08/beans-and-noses/" rel="nofollow">https://archive.uie.com/brainsparks/2011/07/08/beans-and-nos...</a>
This is where efficiency can be applied in two distinct ways. On the one hand, if using more beans means you can solve the problem more quickly, then it is more efficient to the problem solver to do so.<p>But if beans are scarce, and that's where you can try to find ways to use less beans per function, then the goal is to make the function more efficient by using less beans.
You misspelled 'beers'. A boring technology.
I like the general concept, but I think framing it as a small number of discrete tokens isn't quite right. I'd treat the whole thing in terms of <i>debt</i> and <i>risk</i>. Using "non-boring" technology [0] is really just subtracting some amount from your balance. You don't want your balance to go <i>too</i> negative, but carrying some debt is sometimes fine. And some risky bets might turn out to have a huge ROI!<p>The amounts clearly aren't discrete. Writing your entire app on a new language runtime might be very risky (and also might have large potential ROI!), but choosing a new email provider might not be (random example, but presuming that you can swap out providers fairly easily).<p>[0] My bigger complaint is really about the vagueness of even deciding what is "boring." How does a new technology transition from being "non-boring" to being "boring"? Apparently that requires a lot of people to ignore this article's advice for a long time, until we collectively decide that those people have had good enough results to consider that technology "boring."
From TFA:<p>“The nice thing about boringness (so constrained) is that the capabilities of these things are well understood. But more importantly, their failure modes are well understood.”<p>Boring technology is that where you have an extremely small amount of “I didn’t think that was possible” events occurring. As it states, there’s always some; SQLite’s recent WAL-Reset bug that Tailscale discovered is a perfect example of that.<p>Actually, on the subject of databases, I think they all break that rule. I’m a DBRE, and can readily state there are an insane number of footguns with all of them. It’s just that, relative to other options, they’re as good as you’re going to get. Also in their defense, nearly every footgun I’ve ever encountered was documented, it’s just that the docs are incredibly dense, and sometimes a bit vague.
"Weirdness points" are similar: <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/w/weirdness-points" rel="nofollow">https://www.lesswrong.com/w/weirdness-points</a>
I think the same way about any personal project. You can either make something unfamiliar, or make it with unfamiliar technology stack, but you shouldn't do both.
I love this post. It’s also interesting to revisit in the age of agents.<p>Using the language of the article, I’d say “push all your innovation tokens into agents” is probably a good move. This means the tech your agents work with should all be boring tech.<p>Another way of saying this is “use in-distribution technology”. If agents are substantially better at Rust than Zig, probably you should use Rust, even if Zig is “better”. The amount that Zig is better is going to get swamped by the amount that in-distribution agents are better.<p>(This is not a claim that Rust actually is better, just a hypothetical fact pattern for discussion.)
It's a total tangent but AI being so good at developing rust means that my first impression of seeing a rust project has totally changed.<p>4 or 5 years ago if I had to weigh up two options and one was written in rust it was almost a sure thing that the program was snappy, fast, reliable and that the author was competant.<p>Now it's a sure fire sign that the project was probably vibe coded. Not saying it can't still be good, I just have a different first impression now
I admit I have a hard time following this logic. If an agent has a baseline intelligence, you can... instead of using boring technology, just DIY/NIH the simplest custom solution which fulfills your requirements. And you'll usually do a better job than a general-purpose software library.<p>Even if in the other approach, the LLM knows the stack better, you're just going to push the complexity into your <i>client</i> code, so it's not like it's a huge gain to use boring tech stack.
That’s definitely not true, and I’ll give two incredibly common examples:<p>1: arraylist. A library will probably do better than you. It’s already written and common.<p>2: webservers. Sure, you can write one yourself with sockets and a bunch of buffers and string management… or, you could use one of the 100s of existing ones. Which one? Probably a stable and established one.
1. This isn't true whatsoever. You can easily do better than std::vector (trivial relocation support, non-inlined grow), better than C# List<T> (ref T accessor, batch add API, maybe even an add-uninitialised API or in-place constructing specific things), better than a Python list (this one is obvious), etc.<p>2. This is a better point but depending on your workload, I don't think this is unheard of. Or at the very least, if your workload is simple, you can grab one off the top of the benchmarks, point AI at it to customise it a bit then you're good. But to be fair this one's a bigger structural investment so I do see your point. For smaller utilities the tradeoff is pretty clear.
How many times has the stable and established X surprised you with some unexpected behavior?<p>Once upon a time I wanted a URL /like/this/with%2Fslashes/ where a path parameter could, in rare cases, contain an encoded slash. Legit according to every RFC I checked. Works fine in browsers. But I couldn't get the web server to not convert it to a / before hitting my code. And woe betide thee who wants to make nginx return a custom error code 444.
I find agents default to popular which heavily overlaps with boring although you could steer them more boring for sure.
One thing I learned about AI is that, e.g., if you're making websites you're much better off going for php/ruby/elixir, even if you don't like the languages much.<p>Pipelines and deploys gets much easier and faster than the very common TypeScript monorepo, and so does communication between server and client.<p>And I say that as a TypeScript and Effect aficionado who has no particular love for neither php or ruby, but they are extremely solid choices to move fast, well, and get excellent performance and tooling out of the box.
Great point! I'd also add that Django's another solid choice for boring tech that LLM agents will know very well and will very likely continue to do so. A fair bit of SWE Bench and other Python benchmarks are Django related tests, which the LLM vendors care very deeply about keeping their scores up. Also, Django's docs are excellent, so strategically pointing an LLM to them in a prompt can often produce great results.
PHP has had a lot of conventions so the training data is all over the place. Ruby is a nightmare in that regard. Can't speak to Elixir but I'm surprised to hear someone say LLMs producing good code in either language.<p>On the other hand, Go code from 2012 and Go code from 2026 looks virtually the same. Conventions are respected, go fmt is the one single formatter, "use the stdlib" is a popular mantra and the code is readable by design.<p>If I were to codegen a project I wouldn't use anything but Go at this point.
I've been using elixir professionally and for hobby work for the past 7 years now. Language models are damn good at it, and have been for some time.<p>The language isn't huge, the documentation has always been very good, and the patterns extremely consistently across the community. I almost wonder whether it's smaller community has been a benefit, as LLMs have been trained on a tighter set of code samples.<p>I can't speak for Ruby or PHP.
I also like Elixir, and I've used it for a handful of projects, the language may not be huge, but is conversely bloated by macros.<p>I dislike macros and languages allowing developers to get creative with their own DSLs.
> Pipelines and deploys gets much easier and faster than the very common TypeScript monorepo<p>Can you elaborate more on the slowness you've seen with deploying TypeScript codebases? My experience is that it's improved significantly over the past decade or so. tsc is still kinda slow for large projects, but the rewrite to Go should improve things significantly. Pre-install/post-install scripts can also be slow, but I've always disabled those and haven't yet run into issues. The JS-written bundlers can also be slow, but I use the non-JS ones (esbuild, parcel, bun, etc.) and they're fast enough for me to not care. The main build bottleneck I can think of for a modern TypeScript project would be build plugins, since those are still written in JS/TS.
Alternatively, if AI is doing most of the work, why not pick a platform that performs? If the cost of the code (and preferences of the developers) are factored out of the equation, pick based on operational cost.<p>Serving traffic with Ruby and Python is significantly more expensive than serving traffic with Java or Go.
The willingness to reshape society for the benefit of AI rather than shaping AI around humanity paints a very dire picture of the coming decade.
Is that what's happening in this example, though? Ditching TypeScript in favor of PHP seems to be a net positive in favor of having a reliable, performant tech stack. From certain perspectives, TypeScript is itself a form of technical debt: writing code in one language just to transpile it into another interpreted language just to add type safety to correct for human error seems like a heavy layer of complexity just to make development teams work faster.<p>If we get to the point where AI tools are able to consistently able to produce desired results within strict performance and security constraints, without having to make the same tradeoff between delivery velocity and final quality, why would we <i>not</i> have them target the lowest level feasible for implementation, and cut out all of the middleware cruft that makes everything slow and take up ten times the RAM it actually needs to?
I disagree. We've been doing this for two decades already. A lot of monoliths were rewritten in a way that best fit the AWS pricing model of the time with the software itself seemingly being an after afterthought. (I'm not here to discuss whether monoliths or micro services are better, I'm just saying the choice of how they were rewritten was too often mostly for AWS pricing)
I think you're completely misreading what I wrote.<p>PHP (lets use this as an example) brings already many benefits over a common solution like a TypeScript monorepo mostly operational simplicity. That was already true before AI.<p>It's boring, very fast and easy to deploy, offers straightforward horizontal scaling, no need to orchestrate containers and/or multiple runtime processes, has excellent html rendering (nothing in JS-land really does), and has very solid framework solutions like Laravel where everything works out of the box.<p>Those merits existed before AI already.<p>The issue was that you had to buy into PHP as a language, which was a horrible experience.<p>But if AI writes most of the code? Suddenly PHP becomes an excellent candidate to choose for many use cases.<p>If anything, AI makes the choice of programming and languages and software about finding the right tool for the job. Somehow the industry instead keeps vomiting React/Tailwind slop which are the right tool for 1% of the jobs.<p>I hope to have cleared the concept.
I'll push back against this, despite it being so popular. I dislike the arbitrary "innovation tokens" and I think this entire concept really blurs the lines and feels sort of unserious.<p>Engineers should understand requirements, risks, tradeoffs, and potential gains. New technology may be right for that. Novel approaches may be right for that. "Novel" or "New" are only <i>proxies</i> and they're weak.<p>For example, I may think "New" means untested, but is that true? What if a new project has Jepsen testing, a fuzzing suite, massive compute running tons of oracle tests, etc? I should just say "Choose well tested" instead of "Choose old" - lots of old software is very poorly tested.<p>Maybe I think that "Old" implies better documentation, but does it? Lots of older projects have insane cruft and weird edge cases that are undocumented and accumulated over years.<p>Why do we need a metaphor? Why is "innovation token" helpful?<p>If you're incapable of evaluating a technology in terms of these properties, you aren't a serious developer and "boring" will not save you.<p>Sit down, write our your requirements, determine candidate solutions, and choose them based on their fit. "Boring" means nothing, it's a vague proxy term. "Well tsted", "performant for our use case", "developers know it", etc <i>mean something</i>.<p>> MySQL is boring. Postgres is boring. PHP is boring. Python is boring. Memcached is boring. Squid is boring. Cron is boring.<p>Literally every one of these has caused hilarious and disastrous failures for me in my career. But yep, boring.<p>> If you choose to write your website in NodeJS, you just spent one of your innovation tokens. If you choose to use MongoDB, you just spent one of your innovation tokens.<p>What if you know NodeJS really well? Or MongoDb? What if you have empirical, verifiable reasons for why they fit better?<p>I'm a bit tired of "simple" and "boring" and other nonsense words in this field taking up the air in the room that should be spent evaluating solutions on their actual merits.
This was written over a decade ago. I'd take it in that context. Lots of the tech they're talking about was being cargo culted en-masse.<p>So yes, pick boring tech, defined as the tech you know the sharp edges of.
I don't think that context is relevant to my comment. I didn't say "in hindsight, those technologies are great!", I pointed out that "boring" is meaningless, and any meaning you attribute to it like "defined as the tech you know the sharp edges of" is better substituted in.<p>That is, if someone said two sentences, I would only care about the second one:<p>1. "We should use this because it is boring"<p>2. "We should use this because we understand the sharp edges"<p>I wouldn't care at all about (1) and I'd have a real conversation based on (2).<p>Any productive conversation that starts with (1) immediately has to follow "can you clarify what that means", so the term is useless at best and thought terminating at worst.
Isn't this somewhat semantical? Boring implies a lot of the things you said, especially if it means your team's experience is largely pooled in a particular dev environment. Assuming most boring tech is ubiquitous, it's probably rare that your team, statistically, is deeply literate in some obscure tech - they most likely are experts in some definition of "boring".<p>TLDR; #1 and #2 are essentially implying the same thing.
insanitybit's point is that "boring" can imply those things, but it can imply other things too. If you have to bring the correct context to make the word make sense, and there's other contexts that could apply that don't make sense, the word isn't helping. You bringing the correct context is doing the heavy lifting.
I see innovation as a guardrail against CV driven development. More, I think you need to consider the context of when this was written. It was a period of rapid innovation/evolution - I remember more than a handful of projects failing (either undelivered or rewritten well under their expected lifecycle) around this time because teams had taken bets on new tech either they didn't know how to use well or the tech didn't take off and was a dead end.<p>> What if you know NodeJS really well?<p>Then you consider it boring. I'm sure Node and MongoDB were singled out by the author because at the time of writing they were still relatively new and undergoing periods of rapid development and change.
CV driven development is just as well guarded against by asking someone to justify their technical decisions based on the requirements and how the solution meets them. So "boring" does nothing to further that.<p>> More, I think you need to consider the context of when this was written. It was a period of rapid innovation/evolution<p>It's linked today, people feel it's relevant today. This isn't a historic piece about how the tech industry used to be, people reference this post today.<p>> around this time because teams had taken bets on new tech either they didn't know how to use well or the tech didn't take off and was a dead end.<p>Yes, they should have had a discussion about their requirements and which technologies would have solved them.<p>> Then you consider it boring.<p>Then "boring" is useless and you should just say "I know this technology well and it maps to our use case well" and be able to justify that.
> CV driven development is just as well guarded against by asking someone to justify their technical decisions based on the requirements and how the solution meets them. So "boring" does nothing to further that.<p>It doesn't though. It's very easy to manufacture reasons why "shiny new thing" is the objectively right fit for something, even when it's not.<p>The word "boring" is well-chosen because it's addressing a bias most engineers have towards the interesting and new. It's a reminder: that fun new tech you really want to try here may not be, probably isn't, the cold-hearted best choice, if you're being practical and business-minded.
You seem to agree with the lecture/article but disagree with the title.<p>However, it's influenced a lot of people for more than a decade and the snippy title might well have something to do with that.
I don't agree with the article though and I dislike the influence it has had. I have seen engineers use "Boring" to justify "I know this technology" for situations where that technology is a bad fit.<p>Conversations about technical solutions are bespoke, there is no one term that can or should be used to guide them.
My recollection is that MongoDB was based on CouchDB, except they dispensed with Erlang & JSON and went with more conventional technology.
I will say one of my career regrets was kinda being dogmatic about boring tech instead of being pragmatic e.g with new tech<p>there was a period around 2016-17s when people were building stuff with Node.js | Mongo. but it was risky tech though I had experience in it & turned some of those opportunities down cz I wanted to work with boring ruby/swift(iOS stuff) lol. rookie mistake.<p>fortunately the market made me wise up - you go where you're wanted.
> For example, I may think "New" means untested, but is that true?<p>The article answers this, and the answer is "no". New technology is one you don't know the details of.<p>> determine candidate solutions, and choose them based on their fit<p>That's quite hard to do for solutions that you don't know the details.<p>You have an objection to something. It's clearly not to the article's point, though.
> That's quite hard to do for solutions that you don't know the details.<p>That's a great thing to discuss when deciding on the technology. Maybe you should aim for solutions that you know well, or a solution that makes migrating away easy, or maybe you need to do some discovery work, etc.<p>> You have an objection to something. It's clearly not to the article's point, though.<p>It's an objection to the nature of the article itself - that technical decisions should work this way, that metaphors like "innovation tokens" are useful, that "boring" is a good proxy word.
"boring" means familiar. It should have more known unknowns than unknown unknowns.
So then say that.
The article does say that. Explicitly. It's even got a picture of Donald Rumsfeld to help drive the point home.
Well its understood. Maybe your definition of explicitness is only met by things written like Principia Mathematica.
Well your points are making sense in isolation whereas this article is making more sense in general.<p>> I'm a bit tired of "simple" and "boring" and other nonsense words in this field...<p>This is hilarious in sense millions more will be tired and exhausted by evaluating new and exciting technology endlessly appearing all the time.<p>People go by these rule of thumbs which may not be perfect in every single case but they do increase success chances for even sub-par teams as opposed to "rigorously evaluating latest technology"
I don't think it's exhausting to determine if a solution fits your requirements and I don't think much about the people who would find it exhausting. I'm not suggesting some insane formal verification, but you really can't just answer basic questions about how technologies can address problems? Then what is your role? To choose mysql irrespective of requirements?<p>> People go by these rule of thumbs which may not be perfect in every single case but they do increase success chances for even sub-par teams as opposed to "rigorously evaluating latest technology"<p><i>Rule</i> of thumb. And it's not a rule. It's a bias based on a vague term.
> What if you know NodeJS really well? Or MongoDb?<p>Then they're not boring. Boring isn't a universal trait, it has to be evaluated within the context of your own team.
> I'll push back against this, despite it being so popular. I dislike the arbitrary "innovation tokens"<p>It’s a cute way of saying that you can only do 2-3 new things.<p>The post is written for an engineer at a startup as a reminder that although it’s green field development, you only have so much runway, so it’s better to focus on what matters instead of trying some new tech because it seems cool.<p>If you’ve ever had to estimate your stories/tickets/etc in “story points” or “T-shirt sizes” then “innovation tokens” is roughly the same.<p>If you haven’t had to do that, you’ve lived a charmed life.<p>> Engineers should understand requirements, risks, tradeoffs, and potential gains.<p>Ideally. But I’ve worked with plenty of engineers who get far too excited by shiny new tech and overvalue its potential while undervaluing its risk.<p>Hell, I’ve been that engineer in my misspent youth. The post resonates with many of us because it describes hard-won wisdom of our mistakes.<p>> New technology may be right for that. Novel approaches may be right for that. "Novel" or "New" are only proxies and they're weak.<p>Yeah maybe, but unless you’re working on a problem that the tech directly solves, it’s pretty unlikely.<p>> What if you know NodeJS really well? Or MongoDb? What if you have empirical, verifiable reasons for why they fit better?<p>In 2015, MongoDB was a dumpster fire (which is still kind of true) and node.js was still kind of new and had enough rough edges that most teams were probably better off choosing some other language/framework.<p>> I'm a bit tired of "simple" and "boring" and other nonsense words in this field taking up the air in the room that should be spent evaluating solutions on their actual merits.<p>“Boring” and “simple” are ways to convey that it’s good to be risk averse. It’s a bit of rhetorical flourish that helps drive the point home: choose what you work on carefully because you have limited runway and should spend that runway working on the problems that matter for your business, not new tech that’s orthogonal to it.
You are confusing software with technology. Choose boring technology, not choose old software.
It's the "don't eat processed food" of software engineering.
Well, I've not tried to publish this on HN so far, but I guess given such a counterpoint, I should at least attempt to share: <a href="https://www.iankduncan.com/engineering/2026-08-07-getting-freaky-in-the-age-of-ai" rel="nofollow">https://www.iankduncan.com/engineering/2026-08-07-getting-fr...</a>
Feels like some good points but the llm writing makes it feel less trustworthy
I'm reminded of my father in law, who when asked what superpower he'd want, it was flight, so he could get to work without waiting in traffic.<p>If all of your employees are AI's, clarity of vision trumps choosing boring. And if you're having boring visions... well the world is already full of competition for you, so good luck I guess.
> I'm reminded of my father in law, who when asked what superpower he'd want, it was flight, so he could get to work without waiting in traffic.<p>That is tragically sad.
It's better than saying invisibility as that always leads to someone being creepy. Laser beam eyes is of limited use. Moving through walls seems kind of meh to me as that's not a really limiting factor in my day to day. Shooting webs from my writs maybe kind of cool, but if its main use is for moving around it is much more limited than just being able to fly. Lasso of truth isn't really a super power but an interesting artifact. Of all of the super powers, the ability to fly does feel the most utilitarian to me. Plus, think of how environmentally friendly that super power would be if everyone could do it
Telekinesis strikes me as the most practically useful. How often I have yearned for a third hand to hold something at a tricky angle. Depending on how fine of control you get, you can also heat/cool matter.<p>Flight -is it as hard as running? Can I fly faster than I run? Do I get a force field or will I be constantly eating bugs?
It’s easier to imagine a super power than the end of capitalism, apparently.
Boring isn't bad. Ideas are cheap: often the execution is what counts. Doing a boring thing to near-perfection looks like the Japanese Shinkansen trains that average 1.6 minutes of delay annually and have operated with zero fatal accidents over decades of service.
Some of this may have been a reaction to the era of Javascript framework churn. There were way too many different technologies for doing roughly the same job.
They all more or less worked.<p>On the other hand, IBM was late getting into integrated circuits. They had Solid Logic Technology, automated machinery for putting transistors into ceramic substrates to make tiny but discrete circuits. That's what powered the IBM System/360. Worked, but kept mainframe prices high and made IBM late to minicomputers.<p>Innovation when the problem is hard is more interesting. Look at the history of US long range bombers. The B-29 was effective, but underpowered, and had a lot of trouble getting off the ground fully loaded. So, after WWII, the next development was the B-36, which answered the question "what if we scaled up the B-29?"[1] Six propellers, and four jet engines (added late in the design cycle). Was a sky barge, but it worked, as long as no one was trying hard to shoot it down. No flyable aircraft remain. That was the boring technology approach.<p>After that came the B-47, which answered the question "what if we scaled up a jet fighter to bomber size?"[2] The B-47 was all jets, no props. It needed solid-fuel rocket boosters (!) to help it get off the ground, and a drag chute to slow it down on landing. It was terrible to fly; its operating speed and altitude were too near the "coffin corner" where stall and Mach buffet meet.[3] No flyable aircraft remain.<p>Then came the B-52. New engines. New airframe. New design. [4] That's the high-risk approach. It worked. Hundreds are still in active service. Outlasted most of its successors, the B-58 Hustler (a supersonic intercontinental bomber), the B-70, the F-111, etc.<p>On the commercial side, we have Boeing, whose most successful airliner is a variant of the B-737, which first flew in 1967. But that's another story.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKQYG_fA2uM" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKQYG_fA2uM</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1-urTRxeEM" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1-urTRxeEM</a><p>[3] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffin_corner_%28aerodynamics%29" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffin_corner_%28aerodynamics%...</a><p>[4] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8EURBL53_k" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8EURBL53_k</a>
Love this post. Surprisingly controversial; it hasn't made me very many engineering friends.
It's bad for building your resume. Managers and employees are rewarded for popular thing. Popularity is mostly a function of novelty. So the (social and therefore economic) incentive structure is inversely correlated with choosing boring technology.
I see it as analogous to people are frequently rewarded for putting out the fire instead of preventing the fire.
I've been noticing this as a solo dev. I need to put lots of work into infra and security, and all I get for it is... the thing not blowing up (hopefully!).<p>The work is invisible, and impossible to "show off", so it's a bit unrewarding and demoralizing. But hey, someone needs to do it!
Try to explain that part of an imagined "Agentic AI Everything" product being built would be cheaper and more efficient as a simple function call. Good luck!
Yeah, it's pretty unpopular among people who like to try out new technology on every given project.<p>I've found it extremely useful over the years, personally.
This advice holds up, but there are caveats to keep in mind. Two off the top of my head:<p>1. I once worked for a company that had a large Cassandra cluster that was primarily serving the role of a distributed append-only log. This role is as perfect a fit for Cassandra as I can imagine. When we needed a distributed database for authentication, we decided to use Cassandra for it since we had in-house expertise (it was "boring technology") and a cluster we could piggy-back on for a while. When we needed a distributed database for a key-value service, we used the same reasoning and chose Cassandra again. There were many problems with Cassandra that I won't go into, but I will say that straying too far from Cassandra's comfort zone stretched it to a breaking point. And we had some downtime and rough nights because of it. Sometimes boring technology isn't enough, you also need boring workloads for it.<p>2. I was an early adopter for Rust. Before 1.0, it wasn't clear to most people whether the language would mount to anything. To me, I saw a formal proof assistant being put into programmer's hands and could tell right away it had a bright future. Rust was not a boring technology back then. You might say it is now (for some use cases). Adopting shiny new technologies that measurably improve confidence is not a risk. What's foolish is getting comfortable and complacent with familiar, aka boring, technologies that are difficult to use correctly.
I wish there was a jobs board for companies that are somehow vetted for this type of engineering culture.<p>So many jobs are sold as “we’re pragmatist's” and when you show up there’s 5 devs, 50 repos and most of the work is discussing if x requirement should be a new micro service. The product is usually an web app with 10 entities and and an API.<p>Suppose it’s keeping people in jobs
There is, it's java/ruby shops. No one wants to use that stuff in current year, so if they're using it anyway, they're pretty likely to be boring tech users.
Software that works year-after-year has never been a commodity. It's boring on the surface. It doesn't get the flashy posts. But I'll choose reliable over new in almost all cases.
<a href="https://grugbrain.dev/" rel="nofollow">https://grugbrain.dev/</a> Similar on this topic
nawh. 50x node modules, typescript out the wazoo, all the state in the client (where you can't see it in prod), the most over-complicated UI, paired with async callback spaghetti is what you do these days.<p>We're "scalable" over here. It's a sexy problem to have.
Does nobody ever think of trying more than one technology? It’s like people buying a car based on what everyone else is driving rather than actually driving different cars.
Only do one new thing at a time.<p>Don't drive a new car, using new a new type of engine, with a new type of steering wheel, with a new type of entertainment system, .... all at once.<p>WHEN something goes wrong it will be intense trying to figure it out.
Good question.<p>Highly likely to not get any other replies as it’s too much uncommon sense.
Counter-position: "choose most appropriate technology".
I read a similar blog post years ago about restricting the technologies you use, and making do with a slightly worse option if it means reusing the stack you already have.<p>The example they gave was something like they wanted to use rabbitmq for a new side project (I might be misremembering) but they were forced to make it work with redis instead. The author said that years later he found out that that side project had exploded in popularity and it had coped with it fine because the infra team were already handling the stack and it wasn't some snowflake deployment.<p>Does anyone remember the post I'm talking about?
Pretty sure it was this one linked in the OP. See this footnote: <a href="https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology#f4" rel="nofollow">https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology#f4</a><p>> A good example of this from my experience is Etsy’s activity feeds. When we built this feature, we were working pretty hard to consolidate most of Etsy onto PHP, MySQL, Memcached, and Gearman (a PHP job server). It was much more complicated to implement the feature on that stack than it might have been with something like Redis (or maybe not). But it is absolutely possible to build activity feeds on that stack.<p>> An amazing thing happened with that project: our attention turned elsewhere for several years. During that time, activity feeds scaled up 20x while nobody was watching it at all. We made no changes whatsoever specifically targeted at activity feeds, but everything worked out fine as usage exploded because we were using a shared platform. This is the long-term benefit of restraint in technology choices in a nutshell.
The title reminds me of Gunpei Yokoi, the original genius designer at Nintendo, whose philosophy was: lateral thinking, with old technology
I remember reading this back in 2015, but how is this not just the age old conservative (don't do more than needed) vs progressives (lets try some new risk things) debate? As much as I can relate to a more conservative choice when choosing tech that might power a giant consumer company, sometimes using riskier tech in a startup makes more sense to get the real innovation flowing...
and the idea of "Choose New Technology, Sometimes" just feels like a little cheat to get away from the bigger issue with the overall thesis. In this way, the idea in this blog just feels so out of touch.
It’s not about conservative vs progressive but about “safe, battle-tested, stable” vs “could be amazing future-tech”; and the idea of having a small number of innovative technologies, in particular where they matter, is about allowing yourself to spend all those thought-tokens on areas that matter.<p>You don’t want to be innovating your logging tech or your database if the old will work because you might spend 90% of your time trying to get your new, creative logging solution working when you should be spending it on the creative part of your business.
I might be missing something but conceptually, “safe, battle-tested, stable” vs “could be amazing future-tech” IS about conservative vs progressive... am I missing something?
I feel like there's a common theme in business advice like this, the bullshit jobs thesis, general alienation of workers, that individuals have a lot of tunnel vision and don't understand the place of a firm in capitalism. The reality is we don't know what strategies will and won't succeed. The system overall works to the extent it works because a hundred thousand monkeys throwing shit at the wall are bound to hit a few targets at least a few times, even if the vast majority of them miss. The larger economy and investment ecosystems are set up under the assumption that most products will never see a single user and most companies will fail. Most employees will spend much of their careers working on projects that get scrapped. It's not much different than life itself. Evolution has no master plan. Most organisms never reproduce. Most species barely make a blip in any ecosystem before going extinct. It sucks for the individuals, but the larger collective goes on and thrives. Life itself does fine. The economy at large does fine, in spite of the ebbs and flows of the business cycle with its bubbles and recessions. Everything still works out in the long run. It's not only okay to fail but it's crucial to the long run success of our collective endeavors.<p>The vast majority of business strategy is just the lucky survivors assuming in retrospect they were smarter than everyone else. I've been seeing it my entire life, not just in business but in the military, in politics, in sports, in entertainment. Some project leader has one success and coasts off of that forever, failing over and over again afterward because they keep getting rehired, reelected, or re-invested in by inherently conservative investors, hiring committees, team owners, voters, party leaders, who blindly assume winning a Super Bowl means you must have known what you were doing, no matter how many random bounces going your way you had no control over it took.
This is a generalization.<p>And generalizations in software development are always wrong.
One theory these days might be that old, boring technology is better represented in the training data for AI models...
Excellent post. Now, somewhat outdated, and in other ways, more relevant than ever. To whom it may concern: if you need a database, always choose postgresql.
PHP is boring - but it works.
Think inside the box!<p>Sadly, that is real out-of-the-box thinking.
This isn't new.<p>This should not be new.<p>Make your shit work. Make it work well. Don't fuck with a thing that's working as desired.<p>In this way, you'll make everyone's lives at least a little easier.<p>This should be a mandatory teaching to anyone who wants to use the moniker of "engineer".
i just did an AI hackathon and 90% of the submissions were written in TypeScript and Next.js which is mostly due to the training data. AI is skewed to use these tools by default vs the best for the job.
This blog post annoys me a little. Not the post itself - it’s great - but how it has been used to prop up thousands of lazy arguments against innovations over the years.
This is a stupid single minded philosophy. What if the new non-boring technology has an exclusive feature you need? What if it's genuinely better?<p>It's a case by case basis. I wonder why people try to encapsulate these things into "philosophies" that are simple minded and stereotypical.<p>Choose what's better. That's not always necessarily boring technology. Sometimes it is... sometimes it isn't.
aged well
Go hard boring on 80% of what you do. Go hard exciting on the 20% else.<p>Don't let one affect the other.
We use Jira for PM -_-<p>Excel for spreadsheets -_-<p>And Slack for communications -_-<p>Sometimes we use Google (yawn) Docs -_-<p>“I use Linux”<p>O_O
The problem with this is that the list of tech that gets boring changes all time, faster than people's opinions. Kubernetes is very boring tech, but if you go through the old discussion threads on this (even from the last year or two), Kubernetes is still cited as some brand new wizbang thing you shouldn't spend tokens on.
now 11y later i wonder if 'node.js' still needs an innovation token or not
Node.js has been boring for a while.
Do you mean alternatives, like Bun and Deno, or a future direction for itself?<p>edit: Node is boring, as far as the frontend goes -- a notoriously unstable ecosystem.
A problem shared is a problem halved.
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Lol. In 2015 boring technology is at the hands of your PM spinning up some agent spam. Bury this pile of outdated thinking. Go hard at the most difficult programming you can find or go home.