Use boring technology 🥱

In technology choices, sometimes “boring” can be better than “interesting”.

This is something I’ve slowly realized over the last few years.

I would rather solve interesting problems with boring technology than solve boring problems caused by interesting technology.

To be clear, “boring” in this case does not mean “outdated” or “wrong”. It means choosing technology that is appropriate for the task. Technology which is well-known and battle-tested. Technology which you can easily recruit developers for. Technology which you can Google and has hundreds of thousands questions on Stack Overflow.

It can be fun to learn shiny new things and understand complex technology. But it is an empty victory if it does not help us solve an actual problem. It becomes little more than intellectual busywork.

Some projects may require cutting edge technology. But if I am being honest, the projects I typically work on do not. They don’t need a distributed event streaming platform. Nor do they need a state-of-the-art container orchestration system. They don’t even need artificial intelligence! 😉

In fact, during virtually my entire career, choosing new and shiny technology has mostly been a hurdle on the way to solving whatever problem I am actually trying to solve.

How about you? Do you use boring technology?