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Why You Should Choose Boring Technology
An anonymous reader writes Dan McKinley, a long-time Etsy engineer who now works at online payment processor Stripe, argues that the boring technology option is usually your best choice for a new project. He says, "Let's say every company gets about three innovation tokens. You can spend these however you want, but the supply is fixed for a long while. You might get a few more after you achieve a certain level of stability and maturity, but the general tendency is to overestimate the contents of your wallet. Clearly this model is approximate, but I think it helps. If you choose to write your website in NodeJS, you just spent one of your innovation tokens. If you choose to use MongoDB, you just spent one of your innovation tokens. If you choose to use service discovery tech that's existed for a year or less, you just spent one of your innovation tokens. If you choose to write your own database, oh god, you're in trouble. ... 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."
In about 1996, Oracle introduced the "Oracle Webserver", allowing you to serve dynamic webpages generated from stored procedures in the database. The beauty of this is that all of your website code is in the database, making it centrally managed and all application security logic is enforced by the database. The webserver is just a dumb client with no code, and has no permissions on any database tables.
In 2001, it was now a mod for Apache and as since been opensourced (mod_owa). I convinced our client try it for a central website that we were developing, as the middle tier crap they were using didn't work. That system went live 2 weeks later with a few very simple webpages. It has been in production ever since and the website has over 50k users and 20+m hits a day.
"Be grateful for what you have. You may never know when you may lose it."
I think it is important enough to have atleast one 'skunk-works' type project that every developer needs to work on, just to keep up with what will be boring a year or two down the road.
I avoided "not boring" for a couple of years and for the last month, while I look at hybrid mobile apps, I am stunned by my lack of knowledge and the abundance of terms, concepts and technologies that mean nothing to me ... angular, ionic, grunt, promises, JSX, reactjs, compass, gulp, firebase... the list could go on and on and on, these are just things I've started researching over the last few weeks, to make sure I make the right choice.
Every organisation needs a "not boring" slot of time for their developers. Not for product that needs to ship NOW.. but for stuff that may need to ship next year.
Personally I think that one of the problems with software development is that we don't treat it like engineering enough. Not engineering in the sense of building a bridge, but engineering in the sense of design (designing a circuit for example). Engineering is inherently a pragmatic discipline where creativity is constrained by various physical, budgetary, and time constraints. Because software has less of the physical constraints, I think that the "art" side can get a little carried away at times. But the main issue is lack of discipline; and that is more of an artefact of the culture that can be associated with software development, rather than anything inherent in the work itself. I'm biased (with an engineering background), but I think that many software companies could benefit from the attitude that comes with engineering.