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Boring tech is mature, not old

504 点作者 mikece3 个月前

43 条评论

_fat_santa3 个月前
IMHO boring tech is great because it lets you focus on the actual tech of your product. I run a SaaS app and I'd like to think we do alot of cutting edge things in various places, as it relates to the actual product. For things that are "behind the scenes" like databases, backend fraemworks, etc, etc, I prefer to keep all that stuff as boring and as stable as possible. For me working solo on a project, my time is very limited. So I would much rather work on interesting new features for my product than having to touch crap that my customers don't care about. Because at the end of the day my customers don't know and don't care that I use Node vs Deno or Bun, or that I use NPM instead of pnpm, or that I'm not on the latest version of node or Postgres. They don't know all that but they do know how well my app works or what features it has.
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aard3 个月前
I see your point here, but I want represent a counterpoint to this line of reasoning, from my personal experience. I&#x27;ve been in a lot of situations where someone simply wants their way--in this case they want the organization to choose their personal software preference--and so they call it the &quot;boring&quot; choice.<p>By calling it boring, they characterize their _preference_ as the majority accepted, mature, obvious decision and anything else is merely software engineers chasing shiny objects. The truth is almost always more nuanced. Both solutions have pros and cons. They trade-off different values that resonate more or less with different people.<p>So, please be careful with the &quot;it&#x27;s boring and therefore obviously better&quot; argument. Don&#x27;t let it be a way to summarily dismiss someone else&#x27;s preferences in favor of your own--without a deeper discussion of trade-offs. Otherwise it&#x27;s no better than any other condescending attempt (ex. I&#x27;m in charge, so we are doing it this way. No one ever got fired choosing IBM&#x2F;Microsoft&#x2F;..) to win an argument without having to present real arguments.
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taeric3 个月前
I would only add &quot;stable&quot; to what &quot;boring&quot; tech is. Notably, though, not &quot;stable&quot; as in &quot;doesn&#x27;t crash.&quot; But more as in &quot;doesn&#x27;t change.&quot;<p>I think you typically see this with older, established, things. But there is nothing guaranteeing it. And, indeed, it is often the result of specific action on the stewards of a technology.<p>This can often be couched in terms of backwards compatibility. Which is a clear action one can pursue to get stability. However, it can also be seen in greatly limiting scope. As an example, we love talking about scale, but that doesn&#x27;t mean you have to design and build for scale you will never see.
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vrnvu3 个月前
The eternal discussion isn&#x27;t about old vs new or boring vs exciting. Mature is mature regardless of age.<p>A system that breaks when updating dependencies, introduces unexpected behaviour through obscure defaults, forces you to navigate layers of abstraction isn&#x27;t mature... (looking at you Spring and Java ecosystem), it&#x27;s old and unstable.<p>Stability, predictability, and well-designed simplicity define maturity, not age alone.<p>Is Python mature and boring? With toolchain issues and headaches of all kinds... Newer languages like Go or Rust i.e solve all these toolchain issues and make it truly boring in the best way possible.
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jasonthorsness3 个月前
I think it’s hard to tell with the signals we have on GitHub for example the difference between mature and dead as a project. Regardless of what a commit is for, it’s a sign that someone is watching and maintaining and any novel issue will likely be quickly addressed. I think this means new stuff always will have an advantage there.
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0xbadcafebee3 个月前
Nobody ever got a promotion, or hired, by using boring tech.<p>I have a feeling that I don&#x27;t get many replies to job applications because the vast majority of work I&#x27;ve done is &quot;boring&quot;, and the majority of open source code I&#x27;ve written is shell scripts. It all works fantastic, and has zero bugs and maintenance cost, but it&#x27;s not sexy. Intellectual elitism has also defined my role (&quot;DevOps Engineer&quot; is literally just a &quot;Sysadmin in the cloud&quot;, but we can&#x27;t say that because we&#x27;re supposed to be <i>embarrassed</i> to administrate systems); I&#x27;m fairly confident if my resume was more &quot;Go and Rust&quot; than &quot;Python and Shell&quot;, I&#x27;d get hired in a heartbeat.
rqtwteye3 个月前
Boring is great as long as you aren&#x27;t looking for a job. There is a significant risk that you are slowly removing yourself from the job market if you stick to boring tech. Your next employer often doesn&#x27;t give a sh.t that you provided great business value. Most of them want shiny new. When I read the ads of my current employer I don&#x27;t think I would get hired.
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pjmlp3 个月前
Boring tech gets the job done, it lets us focus on the problem we are trying to solve, instead of yak shaving.
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blenderob3 个月前
I was meaning to do an Ask HN about this but this looks like an excellent post to ask my question.<p>What are some boring techs you use that you cannot live without? How long have you been using them?<p>For me, it&#x27;d be stuff like Vim, C, Python, Fedora, mutt and I&#x27;ve been using them for 25-30 years! How about you?
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esafak3 个月前
If the benefits of the newer tech outweigh its risks you use it. The challenge is weighing the evidence. Newer technologies will tout their advantages, but the disadvantages are not advertised as loudly, and are often uncovered after making the investment. &quot;Boring&quot; or &quot;exciting&quot; is the wrong framing.
gregors3 个月前
Boring tech is really better described as extremely late adopter strategy.<p>Maybe it makes sense for your business maybe it doesn&#x27;t. If you don&#x27;t want to be on the forefront of technology, well don&#x27;t. I don&#x27;t think that launching every startup using the late adopter strategy is necessarily going to result in better business performance. Those that find a better way to do things will win.
whatever13 个月前
I can fix boring tech with building 10 layers of frameworks on top of it.
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sunsetSamurai3 个月前
I agree with this article, but with one caveat. Don&#x27;t be the guy that becomes the designated INSERT_OLD_TECH_HERE guy in the office while the rest of the team is working with the cool modern tech that has a lot of jobs in the market, don&#x27;t pigeon your career by becoming an expert in legacy tech, like COBOL, RPGLE or FORTRAN. You&#x27;ll find yourself in a position where you&#x27;ll get fired and won&#x27;t be able to find another job because there aren&#x27;t many jobs for your skills and because companies only want to hire people with years of experience in the tech they&#x27;re using, be it javascript, java, go etc.<p>And also these legacy techs don&#x27;t pay that much in general, for every consultant making bank fixing COBOL bugs there are probably dozens or more COBOL developer making less than a javascript developer, so you&#x27;ll find yourself making less money than a kid with a 3 years of experience in web development, and when you go out in the market trying to switch jobs, you&#x27;ll have a hard time finding a new job or salaries will suck. Don&#x27;t be stupid and become the fall guy to keep the legacy debt going while everybody else in the company is learning the in-demand cool stuff and padding their resumes with hire able skills. You will regret it.
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darksaints3 个月前
I fully agree with this, but the problem with this idea is that if we only ever choose to adopt the most boring mature technology, it doesn&#x27;t give any room for better to ever exist. Be selective and judicious, but also open-minded and willing to re-evaluate. Sometimes the exciting things are exciting for very valid reasons. I&#x27;m okay with hype cycles, even if they are annoying to me as someone who constantly has to justify why I&#x27;m not adopting them, <i>as long as they lead to maturation of innovative ideas</i>.
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xnx3 个月前
This sentiment is also expressed as &quot;Shark not dinosaur&quot;.
noufalibrahim3 个月前
I can relate to this.<p>Most of my career was building dev tools, test infrastructure etc. The cardinal rule there was that it has to be boring.. Practically, this meant no surprises, almost invisible, people take it for granted and it just facilitates things without getting in your way.<p>Similar to electricity, air, water etc. Very few people really notice these things and talk about them. Till they stop working in which case, it&#x27;s all people can think and speak of.
nuc1e0n3 个月前
High tech or low tech, it doesn&#x27;t matter. What matters is whether the tech is appropriate to solve the problems at hand.
frontalier3 个月前
boring tech is _legacy_ tech so we need to rewrite it with copilot and redeploy it<p>let&#x27;s schedule deployment for friday afternoon
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MangoCoffee3 个月前
Information technology is the fashion industry.<p>What is old becomes new, and what is new becomes old. You think you&#x27;re creating some cool new &quot;shitz&quot;, but someone else has already done it. You&#x27;re just reinventing the wheel with some extra &quot;shitz&quot; tacked on
bob10293 个月前
&gt; Using tech that has been subjected to all those people hours of use means you’re less likely to run into edge cases, unexpected behaviour, or attributes and features that lack documentation or community knowledge.<p>Often this is part of the value proposition with commercial offerings - Obtaining access to solutions that work for people with much bigger problems than you.<p>This can differ subtly from the raw scale of deployment. For example, SQL Server and Oracle may not be as widely deployed as something like SQLite, but in the cases where they are deployed the demands tend to be much more severe.
bpfrh3 个月前
I think a good example of boring vs old is wireguard.<p>Wireguard is a pretty simple vpn to setup, has a very predictable and stable behaviour which makes it boring, but it&#x27;s fairly new compared to other vpn software.
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Mystery-Machine3 个月前
Ruby on Rails is amazing!<p>Today I successfully ran `pip install -r requirements.txt` in one Python project I cloned from GitHub, I couldn&#x27;t believe my own eyes. Usually it&#x27;s at least half an hour trying to figure out how to install dependencies.<p>In JavaScript ecosystem, installing packages works, but the packages get deprecated within a few months. React and many other frontend frameworks completely change their philosophy and the recommended way of writing code that you need to rewrite your app every 1-2 years or be left behind with deprecated packages.
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Joel_Mckay3 个月前
In general, having a product disconnected from the hype-cycles has distinct advantages. The lower code permutation rate causes fewer patch cycles that spike labor costs, and the number of unknown exploits&#x2F;errors usually decrease with time.<p>If I recall, this was one reason GNU Octave integrated the Forth+Fortran code used at NASA, and kept the reasoned algorithmic assumptions consistent with legacy calculations.<p>All legacy code has a caveat that depends on if a team cared about workmanship. =3
pplonski863 个月前
Boring tech is boring because it is reliable. You don&#x27;t need to fight constantly with it. You can forget about it, and focus on your work. Maybe reliable equals mature.
sepositus3 个月前
&gt; The number of people I’ve talked with who’ve replaced complicated K8s clusters with a few VMs and seen massive improvements in reliability, cost, and uptime would make some people at the Orange Peanut Gallery more than a little perturbed, for example.<p>If I&#x27;m being honest, I&#x27;m a bit tired of seeing this trope. The details _always_ matter, and when it&#x27;s written like this, it comes across as universally true. Ironically, Kubernetes seems to past the test of &quot;boring&quot; by the author&#x27;s standards considering how long it&#x27;s been around and how many hundreds of thousands of clusters have been running on it over the years.<p>Do people with really bad architecture skills use k8s to design overly complex clusters? Absolutely. Does that represent the entirety of the k8s community? Not even close. Kubernetes is dangerous because of how far down the rabbit hole you can go. People who try to be Google on day one with k8s are generating so much unnecessary negative PR.<p>Alas, it&#x27;s tiresome.
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Waterluvian3 个月前
Last week an issue came up where we have to upgrade from Postgres 12 to 16 because of EOL concerns. I said to another engineer, “Postgres is pretty boring so I bet it’ll be quite easy&#x2F;low risk to do the upgrade.”<p>We got into a meta discussion about how we still have to approach it methodically, but the nice thing about boring, mature software is having a good gut feel that it probably won’t dip into the risk budget much at all.
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some_furry3 个月前
Boring is also a desirable property of cryptography.<p>Boring cryptography is obviously secure.<p>The guiding principle for whether something is boring or not is the Principle of Least Astonishment. If I can, say, send you a ciphertext that was encrypted with an authenticated mode, and then decrypt it to two valid plaintexts using two different keys, this is <i>astonishing</i> even if the impact of it is negligible.
phyzix57613 个月前
The older I get the more I realize the underlying technology is not as important as the problem its trying to solve for the customer.
riffic3 个月前
I like bringing up the concept of a (now defunct) NYC chain of restaurants, Lindy&#x27;s Law and how maturity in tech plays out over time.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Lindy_effect" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Lindy_effect</a>
insane_dreamer3 个月前
This is why, for example, airline systems at airports (not the self-checkin terminals but what the agent is running behind the desk at checkin), and Costco in-store product lookup software -- still runs on AS&#x2F;400 or some equally ancient non-GUI platform
harimau7773 个月前
I think that people would be fine with working on boring tech if companies paid them more to make up for it. If they don&#x27;t, then why should they be surprised that potential employees don&#x27;t want to work on something that they find boring?
harish93v3 个月前
Think boring tech that is still getting active development like linux kernel is mature, not old. Tech that does not allow you to change anything because you are walking on egg shells is boring and old for sure.
api3 个月前
It represents a good fit to a local maximum somewhere. It doesn&#x27;t mean whatever it&#x27;s doing can&#x27;t be done better, but it does contain a lot of information about its problem domain encoded into it.
samsquire3 个月前
Can someone reply me a mature stack that is extremely reliable and won&#x27;t go away? That they&#x27;re using.<p>I had frequently thought that I would prefer to maintain a batch system than an online system.
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nickdothutton3 个月前
One of the most satisfying statements I get to write occasionally is &quot;Component X is now considered functionally complete and so feature Y will not be added to it.
taurknaut3 个月前
Even framing the conversation this way is quite odd. What&#x27;s wrong with being old? Since when did software expire? All the best software is old. And, frankly, all software is boring. So this leaves us with no way to distinguish quality software from the rest.<p>I highly recommend in the future starting from what you actually value about software. Oldness and boringness are not the reasons, and if they are, they are extremely bad reasons.
phlakaton3 个月前
How far we&#x27;ve come from the world of the Blub Paradox.<p>I can&#x27;t resist asking, though: does this make Common LISP boring?
thomastjeffery3 个月前
Mature is great.<p>Incompatible is not.<p>The challenge is to make new software compatible with mature software. The more we try, the easier it gets.
jhickok3 个月前
&gt;The opposite of being bored is to be surprised<p>Eh, the opposite of being bored is being excited&#x2F;engaged, and the opposite of being surprised is being predictable. I don&#x27;t disagree that predictable is probably what we want for a lot of what we see around us (no one wants unpredictable traffic lights), I think we are lying to ourselves if for at least some subset of our work-life we want cool and shiny, so long as we are within the bounds of business objectives.
kyleyeats3 个月前
Old is actually good now because of LLMs. You want something old.
a1exyz3 个月前
is clojure boring yet? Im considering using it for a web app.
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drewcoo3 个月前
And boring tools make holes, not conversation.
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dathinab3 个月前
or partially unmaintained, a security nightmare and not compatible with a lot of stuff you might need to be compatible, too<p>boring tech is nice, if it can get your job done, is compatible with modern security standards and allows fast reliable development<p>sadly that isn&#x27;t always the case<p>especially security standards have shifted a lot in the last 10+ years, partially due to attacks getting more advanced partially due to more insight into what works and what doesn&#x27;t<p>deployment environment and pipelines have shifted a ton, too, but here most &quot;old&quot; approaches continue to work just fine<p>data privacy laws, including but not limited to GDPR, bring additional challenges wrt. logging, statistics and data storage<p>regulations in many places also require increased due diligence from IT companies in all kinds of ways, bringing new challenges to the software live cycle, dependency management, location of deployment. Points like 4-eye-principle, immutable audit logs, and a reasonable standard of both dynamic and static vulnerability scanning&#x2F;code analysis can depending on your country and kind of business be required by law.<p>If your boring tech can handle all that just fine, perfect use it.<p>But if you just use it blindly without checking if it&#x27;s still up to the task it can easily be a very costly mistake, as costly as blindly using the new wide spread hyped tech.