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Whats considered "boring technology"? Typically, I assume it refers mostly to more time test and mature tech, but is it popular mature tech, or just any mature

Whats considered "boring technology"? Typically, I assume it refers mostly to more time test and mature tech, but is it popular mature tech, or just any mature tech in general?

ravenstine 6y ago
I'd consider it a combination of being time-tested and lacking hype. Ruby on Rails is a good example of something which seems to get next to no hype compared to its heyday(even 7 years ago when I started with it), but still powers thousands of businesses and has lots of job postings.
- nicoburns 6y ago
  I think it's mainly about being reliable. For instance, I'd consider Hasura "boring" in the good sense. It's fancy in that it allows you to do realtime queries on top of postgres. That's new and exciting. But it's also boring in that it took about half an hour to set it up. I've zero problems with it since, and the pnly maintenance is that it occasionally propmts me to update to thw latest version. Which takes about 5 minutes and has yet to cause an breakage.
gen220 6y ago
"The stuff they used in the good old days" :) In seriousness, the phrase "boring technology" is, to me, a reference to the talk "Choose Boring Technology" [0], which has been discussed on HN numerous times [1] (deservedly, because it's great). The author doesn't explicitly say what boring technology is, but uses examples you'd generally expect: postgres, php, python, memcached, mysql, apache web server. Basically, products that have been doing relatively complicated things (interpreted code, rdbms, key-value stores) for a very long time. Explicitly, he says that "boring technology" is technology that's defined by its very low maintenance cost. He claims that maintenance costs are mostly driven by uncertainties around failure conditions and design. These kinds of uncertainties are especially present in newer stacks, where the opportunities for footguns and unspecified failure conditions abound, because people are still working them out. He implicitly references Redis as a fancy new technology, but a lot of people today would probably consider Redis "boring" (unless you're trying to use it as your RDBMS). [0]: http://boringtechnology.club/ http://boringtechnology.club/ [1]: recently, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20323246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20323246

Whats considered "boring technology"? Typically, I assume it refers mostly to more time test and mature tech, but is it popular mature tech, or just any mature tech in general?

ravenstine 6y ago

I'd consider it a combination of being time-tested and lacking hype. Ruby on Rails is a good example of something which seems to get next to no hype compared to its heyday(even 7 years ago when I started with it), but still powers thousands of businesses and has lots of job postings.

nicoburns 6y ago
I think it's mainly about being reliable. For instance, I'd consider Hasura "boring" in the good sense. It's fancy in that it allows you to do realtime queries on top of postgres. That's new and exciting. But it's also boring in that it took about half an hour to set it up. I've zero problems with it since, and the pnly maintenance is that it occasionally propmts me to update to thw latest version. Which takes about 5 minutes and has yet to cause an breakage.

gen220 6y ago

"The stuff they used in the good old days" :) In seriousness, the phrase "boring technology" is, to me, a reference to the talk "Choose Boring Technology" [0], which has been discussed on HN numerous times [1] (deservedly, because it's great). The author doesn't explicitly say what boring technology is, but uses examples you'd generally expect: postgres, php, python, memcached, mysql, apache web server. Basically, products that have been doing relatively complicated things (interpreted code, rdbms, key-value stores) for a very long time. Explicitly, he says that "boring technology" is technology that's defined by its very low maintenance cost. He claims that maintenance costs are mostly driven by uncertainties around failure conditions and design. These kinds of uncertainties are especially present in newer stacks, where the opportunities for footguns and unspecified failure conditions abound, because people are still working them out. He implicitly references Redis as a fancy new technology, but a lot of people today would probably consider Redis "boring" (unless you're trying to use it as your RDBMS). [0]: http://boringtechnology.club/ http://boringtechnology.club/ [1]: recently, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20323246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20323246