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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."
A personal corollary for code related to this theme is to always try to make the code I write as "boring" as possible. I've found that programmers often get themselves in trouble by trying to be "clever", which often makes for horribly unintuitive or unnecessarily complex systems. I've heard people asking about how to perform crazy language tricks and I nearly always think to myself "My God, why in the hell would you even *think* about doing something like that?" Such things nearly always point to very fundamental flaws elsewhere.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Mature technologies are proven. They've gone through their growing-pains. They may have limitations, but those limitations and workarounds are usually well known by seasoned professionals. There's a reason why COBOL, Fortran, and RPG are still in use in business applications almost sixty years after their initial development, because they reliably work.
I've tried to work with NodeJS projects for production. It's a nightmare. NodeJS itself is revised too often, the actual project is revised too often, and the dependencies became a nightmare. It's not mature enough and not worth it.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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've recently been getting more heavily into javascript (proper apps, not just UI animation snippets). The whole scene is a mess. You try to learn about good code structure and you've got crockford saying use constructs to simulate classical OO and then a whole lot of other coders giving you really good reasons to use prototypical inheritance and stop trying to simulate a classical language. Then a whole other bunch are telling you to use coffee script but others point out the difficulties debugging it so then you should use typescript because it will eventually be ecmascript6. Once you get your head around the code structuring options, you then have to decide whether to just use jquery or an mvc like ember or angular. And when you choose a shiny new bbc because it is easy you realise that two way data binding makes your code super slow and start having to hack away at it to get it working on a mobile targets. Oh and don't forget the TDD framework unless you go for BDD because that is the new thing. And then do you use the closure compiler, requirejs for amd or should you even use amd at all.
I will happily go with tried and tested, if only web developers would stop reinventing things every six months.
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.
It's like Rincewind said: "I like boring. It lasts."
-- Cheers!
As someone who has a lot of Perl on his resume, I heartily endorse companies hiring people who work with boring old technologies!
Oddly enough, I've seen that cause more problems than it's solved.
It's often misinterpreted, in the same way you so conveniently put it, which is then used to justify some pretty awful decisions regarding third-party libraries. I'm convinced that this is the leading cause of bloated software.
Even when used correctly, I've seen some pretty impressive code-contortions to avoid even a very small amount of duplicate code. Sometimes, it's okay to just do a check twice. As long as the code is easy to read and modify, you're fine. Really.
But that's the problem with programming, isn't it? It's little more than wishful thinking and folk-wisdom. That would be okay (it's an art, after all) but too many developers have deluded themselves in to thinking it's more in-line with mathematics or engineering. They've convinced themselves the cute little acronyms they repeat to one another have some objective, rational, basis and must be obeyed at all cost.
It's silly, really.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Yes. I know this for a fact. I'm going through this right now.
Oh, this new NoSQL database is SO fast and wonderful. Except you can't get it to replicate without an Enterprise version, the price of which no one actually calculated into the cost per user budget. Because it's free and open source, except when it's not.
And you need to have at least three servers to run it even without replication. And no, I am not talking about sharding. I mean running a standard one instance of this garbage requires three instances.
Mind you, if you want NoSQL, there are versions out there that have replica sets for free and somehow manage to complete all standard operations with only one server. But we can't use those. No. They're too boring and predictable and STABLE. Not exciting at all.
Not blaming the current developers, who are left with the pile of shit that the other developers made while having all sorts of fun trying shit out and making everyone else figure out how to actually make it *work*.
The last job, they were circling the toilet bowl because we couldn't finish features. Yet their brilliant idea was to switch their technology, and even change from svn to git, and also chef to ansible. This for no discernible reason, other than the fact that it just seemed like a good idea to them at the time.
Bear in mind, I understand why you might want git or ansible or whatever new libraries, but I'd think that we could wait to redesign our whole build process and switch to a new version control system until after we had enough finished features to attract a customer. Or something.
A lot of good people lost their jobs because some architects and a certain CTO wanted to wank off about how bleeding edge they were. Of course, that dumbass still has a job. I hear they're considering a mobile app now. Or something. Good luck with making an app when you laid off all the testers.
With all that talk, you'd think I had gotten laid off. Luckily I managed to get the hell out, but all the people I worked with there got canned a few weeks later. And none of them were fuck-ups. That is the price of not understanding how to maintain a solid foundation to build a project on.
So yeah. Boring. Functional. Boring tech behind your app or site doesn't make it a bad. Bad design does that. Lack of features does that. Failure to understand operating an application on something more complex than your MacBook does that.
The fact that you using the latest thing does NOT make your app good without you knowing what the fuck you are doing.
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.
Maybe it *is* too innovative.
Its not a matter of Lotus being good. Its a matter of what you can do with limited resources.
If Lotus Notes (shudder) is working for you at the moment, and you really, truly needed to move to node.js, nginx and S3 for some reason, then you need to weigh all the effort that goes into making all of those as stable as you need them to be in order for them to be an actual improvement.
New things need not only code, but tests. If they go into production, they need the operations team to know how to tell if something is wrong with them, and how to fix it. Preferably without waking you up at 4am each time. More preferably with them able to proactively watch for signs of imminent failure and deal with it well before it becomes an issue.
All of that sort of understanding is more than just what it takes to check in some code and some unit tests.
The realistic situation in your scenario is a little backwards because I don't know of any reason to switch to the other three techs without putting Lotus Notes out of its misery first. There does need to be a realistic understanding of priority. What is not-so-good and what is a complete clusterfuck, like Notes.
You can't do everything you want. If you try, you're going to create problems unless you can increase resources. If you can't increase resources, you need to wait.
Yes, but his brilliance was in minimising the number of components required to perform a certain function. His "art" was in solving two pragmatic problems. a) Correct function of device and b) minimising the costs (components). The constraints (physical and budgetary) are what channeled his creativity.
You have a good point, but only most of the time.
Thomas Kuhn, in the context of science, spoke of 'normal' and 'extraordinary' science. Normal science was as you described; you stay in the paradigm and follow the conventional methods for resolving issues. However, these methods did not appear out of nowwhere; somebody was being a clever cowboy and decided its time to do things different. This is where revolutionary science came in. Of course most of these innovations - like any innovation - fails miserably. But if it wasn't for all the failures we would never have the successes that change paradigms and got us to the methods we use today.
And I think this dichotomy does apply to almost every human endeavor.
That said, for normal day to day operations, being a cowboy ALL the time is foolhardy and dangerous. But for people to NEVER have a little bit of an experimental and innovative mindset is also risky in its own way. Sometimes this is balance (known as a bimodal or barbell strategy) is maintained within a single individual by balance of exploiting the traditional and exploring the novel; sometimes its divided between individuals, with a good balance keeping more people stable than unstable.
>developers have deluded themselves in to thinking it's more in-line with mathematics or engineering
Except of course that it IS mathematics. Indeed if engineering is the application of scientific knowledge to the solving of practical problems -then programming is the engineering of the science of mathematics.
From the point of view of a computer every program is just one big number. You can reproduce any and all programs that have or ever could be written by simply counting in binary for long enough.
Yes, count long enough and check the results at every count and eventually you will have a number that, if executed, is microsoft outlook.
That is, however, a rather inefficient way to find useful numbers - to get to outlook THAT way would take centuries even on the fastest computers we have.
So what is programming ? It's a sophisticated way to take shortcuts, to find useful numbers without counting through ever possible number (most of which are not useful at all - i.e. if you dump it as a binary to a file it wouldn't run).
That sophistication of figuring out what the program should do first (i.e. defining what the number should be useful for) and then counting in large chunks (i.e. writing components that help satisfy that over-all design goal) is a form of engineering.
It's a highly creative form of engineering and it is very much an artform too. Art and engineering are generally much more closely related than we usually think: just consider the Eiffel Tower, or ask any sculpture about the constraints the laws of physics place on his designs and choice of materials.
Programming, at least at it's current stage of knowledge, is still at a point where the line is extremely blurred and techniques from both art and engineering can be very valuable.
Over time we may find that it becomes more the one or the other, depending on what produces the best results the most efficiently - but I wouldn't trust any wager on which way it would ultimately go. I will say it would never be just one or the other, by it's very nature it will always have at least some elements of both.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
The original justifications for hating goto referred to a non-local goto (or, exceptions, as the kids call them these days) which made it very difficult to reason about control flow in a program. The new reasons for hating goto in language like C/C++ relate to variable lifetimes and making it difficult to reason about when variables go out of scope.
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