Choose Boring Technology (2015)

> 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. This is one of my favorite blog posts, and it can basically be encapsulated in the idea of "innovation tokens." It is one of the most useful concepts I have had as a PM / eng leader in my career. It helps actually make the the right tradeoffs, and helps even more in explaining those tradeoffs to colleague of all levels. Highly recommend.

I have the similar opinions: We need to remember that the purpose of using tools is to solve specific problems and achieve goals. Having no tools, too few tools, or too many tools can all hinder the achievement of those goals. We only need to select a few useful, universal, and widely applicable tools. Unless there are necessary and sufficient reasons, we shouldn't easily switch to new tools. For the tools we choose, one must become truly familiar with and proficient in their use, continuously customize, modify, and improve them, and strive to use them to the fullest extent, thereby significantly improving efficiency and productivity, and solving practical problems and achieving goals faster and better.

I'll push back against this, despite it being so popular. I dislike the arbitrary "innovation tokens" and I think this entire concept really blurs the lines and feels sort of unserious. Engineers should understand requirements, risks, tradeoffs, and potential gains. New technology may be right for that. Novel approaches may be right for that. "Novel" or "New" are only proxies and they're weak. For example, I may think "New" means untested, but is that true? What if a new project has Jepsen testing, a fuzzing suite, massive compute running tons of oracle tests, etc? I should just say "Choose well tested" instead of "Choose old" - lots of old software is very poorly tested. Maybe I think that "Old" implies better documentation, but does it? Lots of older projects have insane cruft and weird edge cases that are undocumented and accumulated over years. Why do we need a metaphor? Why is "innovation token" helpful? If you're incapable of evaluating a technology in terms of these properties, you aren't a serious developer and "boring" will not save you. Sit down, write our your requirements, determine candidate solutions, and choose them based on their fit. "Boring" means nothing, it's a vague proxy term. "Well tsted", "performant for our use case", "developers know it", etc mean something. > MySQL is boring. Postgres is boring. PHP is boring. Python is boring. Memcached is boring. Squid is boring. Cron is boring. Literally every one of these has caused hilarious and disastrous failures for me in my career. But yep, boring. > 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. What if you know NodeJS really well? Or MongoDb? What if you have empirical, verifiable reasons for why they fit better? I'm a bit tired of "simple" and "boring" and other nonsense words in this field taking up the air in the room that should be spent evaluating solutions on their actual merits.

Some of this may have been a reaction to the era of Javascript framework churn. There were way too many different technologies for doing roughly the same job. They all more or less worked. On the other hand, IBM was late getting into integrated circuits. They had Solid Logic Technology, automated machinery for putting transistors into ceramic substrates to make tiny but discrete circuits. That's what powered the IBM System/360. Worked, but kept mainframe prices high and made IBM late to minicomputers. Innovation when the problem is hard is more interesting. Look at the history of US long range bombers. The B-29 was effective, but underpowered, and had a lot of trouble getting off the ground fully loaded. So, after WWII, the next development was the B-36, which answered the question "what if we scaled up the B-29?"[1] Six propellers, and four jet engines (added late in the design cycle). Was a sky barge, but it worked, as long as no one was trying hard to shoot it down. No flyable aircraft remain. That was the boring technology approach. After that came the B-47, which answered the question "what if we scaled up a jet fighter to bomber size?"[2] The B-47 was all jets, no props. It needed solid-fuel rocket boosters (!) to help it get off the ground, and a drag chute to slow it down on landing. It was terrible to fly; its operating speed and altitude were too near the "coffin corner" where stall and Mach buffet meet.[3] No flyable aircraft remain. Then came the B-52. New engines. New airframe. New design. [4] That's the high-risk approach. It worked. Hundreds are still in active service. Outlasted most of its successors, the B-58 Hustler (a supersonic intercontinental bomber), the B-70, the F-111, etc. On the commercial side, we have Boeing, whose most successful airliner is a variant of the B-737, which first flew in 1967. But that's another story. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKQYG_fA2uM [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1-urTRxeEM [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffin_corner_%28aerodynamics%... [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8EURBL53_k

I love this post. It’s also interesting to revisit in the age of agents. Using the language of the article, I’d say “push all your innovation tokens into agents” is probably a good move. This means the tech your agents work with should all be boring tech. Another way of saying this is “use in-distribution technology”. If agents are substantially better at Rust than Zig, probably you should use Rust, even if Zig is “better”. The amount that Zig is better is going to get swamped by the amount that in-distribution agents are better. (This is not a claim that Rust actually is better, just a hypothetical fact pattern for discussion.)