Choose boring technology | Hugonweb Annotated Link Bibliography

Author: Dan McKinley

The idea is that the more new, exciting, "poorly-understood" things you choose, the more complex and difficult to deal with your system becomes. He advocates for a company to pick three or less non-boring technologies and to pick them where it maximizes your competitive advantage.

This whole article is great!

What counts as boring? That’s a little tricky. “Boring” should not be conflated with “bad.” There is technology out there that is both boring and bad (we often casually refer to the boring/bad intersection of doom as “enterprise software,” but that terminology may be imprecise). You should not use any of that. But there are many choices of technology that are boring and good, or at least good enough. MySQL is boring. Postgres is boring. PHP is boring. Python is boring. Memcached is boring. Squid is boring. Cron is boring.

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.

Emphasis theirs:

One of the most worthwhile exercises I recommend here is to consider how you would solve your immediate problem without adding anything new. First, posing this question should detect the situation where the “problem” is that someone really wants to use the technology. If that is the case, you should immediately abort.