An Essay on Technology Choices

The case for boring technology

Why choosing the unglamorous, proven tool over the shiny new thing is the most radical engineering decision you can make.

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The cost of excitement

Every new technology adds a tax you pay forever

  • Maintenance burden: every dependency is a liability you own indefinitely, not just at launch
  • Cognitive load: your team's attention is finite, and context-switching between tools compounds
  • Edge cases: boring tools have had their edge cases found and fixed by decades of production use
The best code is the code you never had to write. The best tool is the one your team already understands.
Dan McKinley - Choose Boring Technology
The four-bag rule

Adopt at most one new technology per quarter

  • Bag 1: Languages: the ones your team writes production code in today
  • Bag 2: Datastores: the ones you can operate under load at 3am
  • Bag 3: Messaging: the ones your on-call runbooks cover
  • Bag 4: Libraries: the ones your security team has audited
What to do Monday

Choose boring. Ship faster. Sleep better.

The boring choice is not the lazy choice. It is the choice that lets you spend your innovation budget on the problems that actually matter to your users.

Audit your stack