This month I want to highlight an article, Choose Boring Technology, by Dan McKinley. The author posits that selecting a small set of proven technologies leads to superior, long-term business results. This is not because older technology is always the best local decision, but because the edge and failure cases are well understood and thus cause less pain when encountered. We want development to focus on solving hard problems, but much of our practical development instead focuses on solving failure cases. By sticking with a small set of proven technologies, we simplify our failure cases, and thus we can spend more time solving interesting business problems.
https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology
“It can be amazing how far a small set of technology choices can go. The answer to this question in practice is almost never ‘we can’t do it,’ it’s usually just somewhere on the spectrum of ‘well, we could do it, but it would be too hard.’ If you think you can’t accomplish your goals with what you’ve got now, you are probably just not thinking creatively enough.”

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