Choose Boring Technology

A counter response to the growing sprawl of technologies that argues boring technology (tried and true, more mature) is far more effective than the latest shiny tool that gets popular on HackerNews. Using the right tool for the job is often used to justify some new thing, but quickly dissolves when teams write down exactly the issues with the current stack that are not meeting their needs.

Read the blog post

Links to this note

• Every Infrastructure Decision I Endorse or Regret

  Inspired by (Almost) Every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret, I thought it would be interesting to do the same for my startup.

• List of Boring Technology

  The following list of things are my choices for boring technology.

• Taking an Airplane into the Water

  The user is complaining that our boat is leaking through the windows, it’s unstable, and too slow. Sometimes you have to remember that some users will never be happy with your product because they decided to take an airplane into the water.

• Prevent Empty Strings in Postgres

  A common data consistency issue is writing empty strings to the database. An empty string "" is a perfectly valid text or varchar but is usually not what you want.

• There Is No Software Maintenance

  In There Is No Software Maintenance by Henrik Warne, the author argues that software maintenance is just product development. Since software is never “done”, all of the things we call maintenance such as bug fixes and improvements are feature enhancements and iterating on the original feature.

• A Single Cistercian Numerals Indicates a Value from 1 to 9999

  Unlike Arabic or Roman numerals, a Cistercian numeral can represent any number between 1 and 9999 with a single glyph. This makes for a compact representation which were used for recording dates, indexes, numbering, and even used for labels on an Astrolabe.

• Abstractions Save Time Working, but Not Learning

  Software abstractions save us time doing work by not having to write programs from lower level building blocks. Programming languages like Python provide an easier way to write general purpose software than say, assembly language.