“Choose boring technology”

This article on choosing boring technology is so good. It’s from 2015 so some of the tech it references is more mature, but the thesis is that the technology underlying a business should be well known and boring to implement. It also discusses how important cohesive technology can be (I love the final footnote).

I think this is an interesting contrast to microservices, which is essentially solving repeatedly for local optimizations and then relying on the API or message boundary to allow scaling. Microservices, in my experience, often get a bit hand wavey when it comes to operationalization (“just put it on Kubernetes, it’ll be fine”).

I have definitely dealt with this in previous companies where I had to put the kibosh on new technologies being introduced (“nope, we’re going to do it in java”). This meant that as a small team we had a standard deployment stack and process and could leverage our logging knowledge and debugging tools.

Here are some arguments I hear for using the latest and greatest technologies:

• “Our developers will get bored and we’ll have a hard time recruiting”
  • This is a great reason to have regular hackfests and or support developers working on open source or side projects.
• “New tech will help us do things faster”
  • It’s definitely worth evaluating new technology periodically and adding it to your stack (especially if it is outsourced, a la RDS, or boring, a la memcached). As the original post mentions, if you get substantial benefits from the new technology, then use it full bore and plan for a migration. Don’t end up in a state where you are half in/half out. Also consider tooling and processes to get things done faster–these may have quicker iteration times with lower operational risk.
• “Choose the right tool for the job”
  • Most turing complete languages can be used for any purpose. And you shouldn’t be optimizing for the right tool for the job, but rather the right tool for the business for the job.

Really, you should just go read the post. It’s good.