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The points often lost here is that (1) this advice is aimed at startups, and (2) the whole concept of "innovation tokens." Any successful business is going to

by mikece 3y ago

The points often lost here is that (1) this advice is aimed at startups, and (2) the whole concept of "innovation tokens." Any successful business is going to solve some problem which is probably not so obvious and that takes innovative thinking. If you're spending too much time trying to be innovative with your tech stack then you're NOT innovating on your specific difference as a business, and that hold you back (or could bankrupt you). All of that said, today's tech landscape is far less edgy than the early days of cloud, NoSQL, and NodeJS. I'm not even sure what tech is out there that would qualify as "spending your innovation tokens" other than AI.

eternityforest 3y ago
Blockchains, making your own JS framework/language/static site generator/MQTT alternative/etc, building a desktop GUI toolkit, making your own VCS, retro hipster type stuff like handwriting HTML with no templates or JS, or using Linux without some kind of configuration management system...
chii 3y ago
> I'm not even sure what tech is out there that would qualify as "spending your innovation tokens" other than AI. that's why they call it innovating. If you knew already, then it wouldn't be innovating, since it's not the innovation that's new.
jpgvm 3y ago
Biggest time wasters and innovation token consumers IMO is third-party vendors, especially shiny startups/products. Don't waste your time, money and energy being someone else's guinea pig, you need to be focused on your business problems. Bigger companies that have engineers and resources to waste can try these out for you and eventually that startup you knew a few years ago will either be successful and ready for you to use or dead and you will be glad you didn't waste the effort. Same goes for propropertary cloud services that have no business being proprietary. Biggest culprits here are data silo-ing lock-ins like DataDog, avoid like the plague. Use the standard off the shelf tools for everything you can, OSS may require slightly higher upfront integration costs in some cases, less than you think though, sometimes it's substantially faster due to integrations. Generally speaking if a project has been around long enough folks have already encountered every problem and shared every solution. If you are stuck with some proprietary vendor for some important part of your stack and you are hitting an edge condition you had better hope you are a big enough fish for them to care (hint: You aren't). I guess at the end of the day keep yourself off the Kool-Aid, ignore marketing speak and always ask hard questions of things and you will avoid innovation token sinks.
- kitd 3y ago
  Generally speaking if a project has been around long enough folks have already encountered every problem and shared every solution. I call it "StackOverflowability". Pick tech where you'll find all the answers you need on SO.
  - quickthrower2 3y ago
    I am using express for a side project. A popular middleware was last touched 10 years ago. You can read all the source in 5 minutes. And it works. I craft forms tags like it is 1999 and use .ejs files which is like active server pages. If there is a problem I can figure it out from first principles. It is a relief compared to modern stacks.
- dgb23 3y ago
  It’s interesting that the wisdoms of “buy, don’t build” and “NiH” etc. seem to be shifting in general. I think a lot of people have been realizing through the pain of maintenance that dependencies are liabilities and that general, open source solutions with a bit of plumbing are often the lesser evil in that regard. Given my anecdotal experience it seems to be true in the small, and I can imagine how this problem is even more pronounced in the large.
  - bongobingo1 3y ago
    Don't clone, contribute!
  - re-thc 3y ago
    > It’s interesting that the wisdoms of “buy, don’t build” and “NiH” etc. seem to be shifting in general. I don't know how these can ever be a "wisdom". It's often taken out of context and most people don't even understand how or where it should applied. If you blindly apply anything it's never a wisdom. Something like "buy, don't build" earn companies $$$ and there is likely heavy influence from those trying to profit from it more than a general wisdom.
  - hobs 3y ago
hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
You can get pretty far in most business lines with Python, JavaScript and SQLite. You may not get all the way with them, but by the time you have to worry about that you can hire someone else to do so. That's what I always tell myself.
strken 3y ago
You can make bad technology choices today. For example, if you were using Typescript to build a mobile app, you might be tempted to use TypeORM (32k stars on GitHub, been around since 2016, widely used). If you wanted to also use transactions and concurrency then this would be a mistake, because you would quickly find that TypeORM's SQLite adapter doesn't have a connection pool or locking for transactions, and will happily execute statements inside a transaction then roll them back without your knowledge.
- chucke 3y ago
  And I never heard of TypeORM until now, which means that it's not boring tech in my eyes. I find it hard to classify anything in the node world as boring, considering the infamous churn rate. Popular yes, boring no.
- flakes 3y ago
  Ive been increasingly disliking ORMs in general lately. After a few days of trying to identify connection leaks and poorly optimized queries in a SQLAlchemy application, I’m starting to lose my hair. I think this actually speaks well to the point of the article. We can simplify the logic a lot by using boring tech, in this case, separating the query builder logic from the connection/transaction logic. Switching from one very complex ORM, to two more understandable simple systems, and getting back to more grass roots with querying.
  - jpgvm 3y ago
    Query builders are the way to go. The pick of the bunch is jOOQ IMO but not everyone is on the JVM but I would be looking for something similar if I had to code on a different platform.
- pharmakom 3y ago
  I think this shows that boring is a necessary but not sufficient criteria for good technology. ORM is a great example of something boring yet bad.
- raverbashing 3y ago
steveBK123 3y ago
Alphabet soup of similar sounding v0.1 AWS services?
sparrowInHand 3y ago
There are frameworks that take outrageous amounts of time producing very little, besides opinionated staff. Basically assembly for X in disguise, demanding everyone be "educated" and up to task. Meanwhile the world moved on.
nailer 3y ago
> I'm not even sure what tech is out there that would qualify as "spending your innovation tokens" other than AI. Spending a few hundred K on Unnecessary Kubernetes (and the surprises that result) is definitely still a popular thing amongst junior/mid devops people.
- hnreport 3y ago
  Gotta let the kids pop their cherry on something.
  - dang 3y ago
    Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
pjmlp 3y ago
Rewriting in Go and Rust, with a blog post afterwards, would qualify. Guest languages on the JVM and CLR. Mobile apps with hybrid stuff, instead of the SDK languages. Also using SPAs for what would be doable in PHP.
eddmakesio 3y ago
> todays tech landscape is far less edgy Writing an app in a microservice architecture with services in Rust, Go, and Nim. Database is a serverless DB like Planetscale. Front end in HTMX. Etc… I think any tech your team is not already familiar with, and isn’t the standard pick, is an innovation token.
- appplication 3y ago
  So I agree 100% with this, but postgres is so easy and scales infinitely (for the meaning of infinite in 99% of business use cases), I suppose I don’t understand why I would choose MySQL. Do folks just use it as a user cache? Most systems I’ve designed of worked on have required a central database so MySQL never seemed the right fit.
  - eddmakesio 3y ago
    I'm not sure tbh! I also agree with PostgreSQL. The last time I used MySQL was MariaDB in 2015/6 or something.
  - paulryanrogers 3y ago
    MySQL has better compression and IME can scale further thanks to redo log and alternative engines. Still love Postgres's rich feature set for smaller DBs.

by mikece 3y ago

eternityforest 3y ago

Blockchains, making your own JS framework/language/static site generator/MQTT alternative/etc, building a desktop GUI toolkit, making your own VCS, retro hipster type stuff like handwriting HTML with no templates or JS, or using Linux without some kind of configuration management system...

chii 3y ago

> I'm not even sure what tech is out there that would qualify as "spending your innovation tokens" other than AI. that's why they call it innovating. If you knew already, then it wouldn't be innovating, since it's not the innovation that's new.

jpgvm 3y ago

Biggest time wasters and innovation token consumers IMO is third-party vendors, especially shiny startups/products. Don't waste your time, money and energy being someone else's guinea pig, you need to be focused on your business problems. Bigger companies that have engineers and resources to waste can try these out for you and eventually that startup you knew a few years ago will either be successful and ready for you to use or dead and you will be glad you didn't waste the effort. Same goes for propropertary cloud services that have no business being proprietary. Biggest culprits here are data silo-ing lock-ins like DataDog, avoid like the plague. Use the standard off the shelf tools for everything you can, OSS may require slightly higher upfront integration costs in some cases, less than you think though, sometimes it's substantially faster due to integrations. Generally speaking if a project has been around long enough folks have already encountered every problem and shared every solution. If you are stuck with some proprietary vendor for some important part of your stack and you are hitting an edge condition you had better hope you are a big enough fish for them to care (hint: You aren't). I guess at the end of the day keep yourself off the Kool-Aid, ignore marketing speak and always ask hard questions of things and you will avoid innovation token sinks.

kitd 3y ago
Generally speaking if a project has been around long enough folks have already encountered every problem and shared every solution. I call it "StackOverflowability". Pick tech where you'll find all the answers you need on SO.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  I am using express for a side project. A popular middleware was last touched 10 years ago. You can read all the source in 5 minutes. And it works. I craft forms tags like it is 1999 and use .ejs files which is like active server pages. If there is a problem I can figure it out from first principles. It is a relief compared to modern stacks.
dgb23 3y ago
It’s interesting that the wisdoms of “buy, don’t build” and “NiH” etc. seem to be shifting in general. I think a lot of people have been realizing through the pain of maintenance that dependencies are liabilities and that general, open source solutions with a bit of plumbing are often the lesser evil in that regard. Given my anecdotal experience it seems to be true in the small, and I can imagine how this problem is even more pronounced in the large.
- bongobingo1 3y ago
  Don't clone, contribute!
- re-thc 3y ago
  > It’s interesting that the wisdoms of “buy, don’t build” and “NiH” etc. seem to be shifting in general. I don't know how these can ever be a "wisdom". It's often taken out of context and most people don't even understand how or where it should applied. If you blindly apply anything it's never a wisdom. Something like "buy, don't build" earn companies $$$ and there is likely heavy influence from those trying to profit from it more than a general wisdom.
- hobs 3y ago

hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago

You can get pretty far in most business lines with Python, JavaScript and SQLite. You may not get all the way with them, but by the time you have to worry about that you can hire someone else to do so. That's what I always tell myself.

strken 3y ago

You can make bad technology choices today. For example, if you were using Typescript to build a mobile app, you might be tempted to use TypeORM (32k stars on GitHub, been around since 2016, widely used). If you wanted to also use transactions and concurrency then this would be a mistake, because you would quickly find that TypeORM's SQLite adapter doesn't have a connection pool or locking for transactions, and will happily execute statements inside a transaction then roll them back without your knowledge.

chucke 3y ago
And I never heard of TypeORM until now, which means that it's not boring tech in my eyes. I find it hard to classify anything in the node world as boring, considering the infamous churn rate. Popular yes, boring no.
flakes 3y ago
Ive been increasingly disliking ORMs in general lately. After a few days of trying to identify connection leaks and poorly optimized queries in a SQLAlchemy application, I’m starting to lose my hair. I think this actually speaks well to the point of the article. We can simplify the logic a lot by using boring tech, in this case, separating the query builder logic from the connection/transaction logic. Switching from one very complex ORM, to two more understandable simple systems, and getting back to more grass roots with querying.
- jpgvm 3y ago
  Query builders are the way to go. The pick of the bunch is jOOQ IMO but not everyone is on the JVM but I would be looking for something similar if I had to code on a different platform.
pharmakom 3y ago
I think this shows that boring is a necessary but not sufficient criteria for good technology. ORM is a great example of something boring yet bad.
raverbashing 3y ago

steveBK123 3y ago

Alphabet soup of similar sounding v0.1 AWS services?

sparrowInHand 3y ago

There are frameworks that take outrageous amounts of time producing very little, besides opinionated staff. Basically assembly for X in disguise, demanding everyone be "educated" and up to task. Meanwhile the world moved on.

nailer 3y ago

> I'm not even sure what tech is out there that would qualify as "spending your innovation tokens" other than AI. Spending a few hundred K on Unnecessary Kubernetes (and the surprises that result) is definitely still a popular thing amongst junior/mid devops people.

hnreport 3y ago
Gotta let the kids pop their cherry on something.
- dang 3y ago
  Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

pjmlp 3y ago

Rewriting in Go and Rust, with a blog post afterwards, would qualify. Guest languages on the JVM and CLR. Mobile apps with hybrid stuff, instead of the SDK languages. Also using SPAs for what would be doable in PHP.

eddmakesio 3y ago

> todays tech landscape is far less edgy Writing an app in a microservice architecture with services in Rust, Go, and Nim. Database is a serverless DB like Planetscale. Front end in HTMX. Etc… I think any tech your team is not already familiar with, and isn’t the standard pick, is an innovation token.

appplication 3y ago
So I agree 100% with this, but postgres is so easy and scales infinitely (for the meaning of infinite in 99% of business use cases), I suppose I don’t understand why I would choose MySQL. Do folks just use it as a user cache? Most systems I’ve designed of worked on have required a central database so MySQL never seemed the right fit.
- eddmakesio 3y ago
  I'm not sure tbh! I also agree with PostgreSQL. The last time I used MySQL was MariaDB in 2015/6 or something.
- paulryanrogers 3y ago
  MySQL has better compression and IME can scale further thanks to redo log and alternative engines. Still love Postgres's rich feature set for smaller DBs.