> One, it's about rejecting newer tech on a bet you don't need their features. Not really. It's more a bet that the limitations of the new tech - bugs, missing

> One, it's about rejecting newer tech on a bet you don't need their features. Not really. It's more a bet that the limitations of the new tech - bugs, missing or incorrect features, lack of support, etc - will outweigh the benefits of the new tech's features. > And two, it's about choosing older tech because you assume it's good enough for the one year, two year, five year plan. This is often provably true, because you can point to personal experience where an older tech has been good enough for a five year plan. I think PostgreSQL is the ur example of this. Every once in a while, a new hotness comes along, ready to dethrone Postgres. Monog was the one I got caught up in. Mongo was so much easier to use, from a developer's perspective. The install was easier, the API was easier, clearing out test data after each run was easier. I loved it. But it also wasn't ACID compliant. Oops. > If you need rapid deployment of new infra as you roll out installations for new customers, choosing manual CloudFormation config over Terraform could be a bad call. Terraform is seven years old. It's not new tech, it's a proven, industry standard. And that's kind of the unspoken assumption of this piece: if your focus is on production, let someone else play with new tech until it becomes old tech. Let them assume the risk. > The first time I saw it was in a mildly heated debate about whether we should use React. This essay isn't saying "don't use new tech," it's saying "use new tech responsibly," and "limit the number of unknowns in your production system." It's saying that "going fast" and "cool new features" needs to be balanced with "reliability" and "support." And React is also eight years old, so it isn't a new tech, either. It's one of, if the not, de facto standards. I don't know when your team had that conversation, but React is a tech that fits very comfortably into the "we know what sucks about it" category, and has for a few years now. So does NodeJS, which is on his slides as an example of spending an innovation token. Tech marches on. Our understanding of it advances. Stuff that was new becomes old, and stuff that's old becomes obsolete. This essay isn't saying "don't move forward," it's saying "don't pick something because it's new, pick something because you can prove that it will help you."