Why I love boring technology

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Every few months a new database, framework or runtime promises to change everything. Some of them do. Most of them change something, usually the number of things that can go wrong at 3am.

Boring is a feature

A boring technology is one whose failure modes are well understood. Someone has already hit the weird edge case, written the blog post and fixed the bug. When I pick Postgres over the shiny new thing, I'm not picking the past. I'm picking a decade of other people's pain that I don't have to repeat.

• Boring tools have answers on page one of the search results.
• Boring tools have operators who know them.
• Boring tools let you spend your novelty budget on the product.

Spend your innovation tokens wisely

Every team gets a small number of chances to do something genuinely new. I'd rather spend them on the problem only we can solve, and let everything underneath be quietly, wonderfully dull.

// The best code is the code that never pages you.
if err := db.Ping(ctx); err != nil {
    return fmt.Errorf("db unreachable: %w", err)
}

The goal isn't to never try new things. It's to know exactly why you're doing it.