Boring Tech Is Stifling Improvement

https://yonkeltron.com/posts/boring-tech-is-stifling-improvement/

by todsacerdoti • 2 years ago

31 69 2 years ago

qsort• 2 years ago

The problem I have with the argument is that "improvement" needs to be something objective and measurable. "I'm throwing away old code because eww" isn't improvement. The two examples cited are very telling:

Consider cases like introducing Kotlin to gradually level-up a Java shop.

But why? Introducing a second language to do pretty much the same thing is a giant leap in complexity and it's not obvious we'd get something real in return.

What about a PostgreSQL operation rewriting SQL stored procedures in PL/Python?

Yet again, why? SQL is popular and very well understood, the alternative solution would be less portable and a rewrite would introduce unnecessary risk.

altdataseller• 2 years ago

Throwing away old code and rewriting it in a sexy, new language also takes time away from projects that are actually meaningfully innovative: ie projects that help customers do more, or be more efficient

Larrikin• 2 years ago

Kotlin became the language of Android, not because it was new, but because multiple company's studied it and devs were more productive in the language after a relatively short on ramping period, many cases a weekend to get familiar and less than a month to be more productive.

Java was stagnating on Android as well and Kotlin was able to introduce a lot of modern features far more quickly. The only argument to keep with Java is that Java actually seems to be chasing after some of the gains Kotlin made.

ktosobcy3• 2 years ago

Kotlin became the language of Android, not because it was new, but because multiple company's studied it and devs were more productive in the language after a relatively short on ramping period, many cases a weekend to get familiar and less than a month to be more productive.

[citation_needed]

Java was stagnating on Android as well and Kotlin was able to introduce a lot of modern features

Java was stagnating on Android because Google was (and is) lagging with implementing newer features. Android 12 only got support for Java 11 ffs...

Interestingly enough with Project Mainline it will be possible to support newer Java versions in Android…

avgDev• 2 years ago

I was let's rewrite this app guy once. I rewrote the whole app and realized that main issues were documentation and lack of understanding by anyone within the business how the system actually works.

The new app is better, but if a new dev looked at the code base they would suggest a rewrite. I would want to do it too, but I just don't feel like joining that rodeo at the moment.

This cycle will repeat till the end of time.

adamc4• 2 years ago

Strongly agree with this. Software Engineering needs something equivalent to evidence-based-medicine. (I think it exists, but isn't as widespread as it should be.)

vundercind3• 2 years ago

Business needs that. Everyone jumped on the data-driven train (how rigorous was the information that lead them to do that? LOL) but it’s top-to-bottom bullshit. We have almost no clue how to measure management efficacy, for instance, and the methods we do have are too fiddly and require large sample sizes in just the right circumstances, so nobody but academics even try. It’s like that for almost everything. You look at the data gathering behind and analysis methods for the median strategy PowerPoint and it’s just gibberish, completely useless nonsense, and it doesn’t exactly take a trained & practicing scientist to tell, but everyone who can spot these things and is on the management track knows they’re not supposed to point that out. It’s all a big, weird game of pretend.

neurobashing• 2 years ago

Foamed glass gravel was invented in the early 20th century, by the Soviets no less, and started being used more in the 80s. It is a "boring" technology. (Source: https://www.glavel.com/foam-glass-aggregate-guide/)

pfdietz• 2 years ago

Foamed glass would be a really neat technology for use on the moon.

SoftTalker• 2 years ago

Also it was used for a temporary repair to get the road open again while a permanant repair was made using more conventional roadbuilding.

If you know something is a temporary repair and time is the most important consideration, you can take risks or shortcuts (crushed stone wasn't available) because you know it's not a permanent fix.

dmoy2• 2 years ago

all-new construction material

Foam glass gravel? If this was an analogous computer software article, it would read

""" ... and in 2023, the team shipped a frontend in record speed using an all-new programming language "JavaScript"... """

Maybe foam glass gravel is new on the scale of construction materials, sure? But it's been used in road construction since the 1990s.

So this article reads a bit... strange to me.

dmoy2• 2 years ago

Other poster pointed out that the base foam glass tech was invented in the 1930s

So actually it would be more like

""" ...and in 2096, the team shipped a frontend using an all-new JavaScript framework called Foo, first used in Norway in the late 2050s..."""

iterateoften• 2 years ago

Author seems to conflate innovation with progress.

Just because something is innovative (like in his example introducing kotlin when everyone else is using Java) doesn’t mean it will lead to progress.

cmiller1• 2 years ago

But it seems that progress requires innovation, and some innovations will fail while others will succeed, driving the "evolution" of technology a la survival of the fittest. Ideally anyways, as just with real evolution "fittest" doesn't always line up with our human perception of "best".

regularfry• 2 years ago

Progress requires innovation but it doesn't necessarily require your innovation. Progress happens when an innovation spreads. By the time it's spread across half the landscape it doesn't look like innovation any more, it's just how things are done. But it's still progress when it gets from 80% to 90%.

Sevii2• 2 years ago

Introducing kotlin during the Java 8 era was innovative. In 2024 with Java 23 out you aren't gaining anywhere near as much.

yadaeno• 2 years ago

Does Java 23 have coroutines?

Uehreka2• 2 years ago

The thing I find most frustrating about “The Boring Revolution” is that it feels stuck in the particular year of 2015. Like, React has been out for 12 years. React is older now than Ruby on Rails was when the Boring essay came out. And yet I still hear people talk about React as this “shiny trendy thing”, even though it’s a mature technology with huge adoption, mountains of examples and documentation, and millions of developers with years of experience building in it.

If the essay had come out in 2008, Ruby on Rails would’ve been the “exciting” thing it was calling out. But instead, Ruby on Rails is generally considered in the “boring” camp, while things that came out closer to the essay’s publication like React are in a state of “Permanent Shiny”.

All of which blinds people to the fact that the web space has in fact settled down years ago and is not in the state of immense flux that actually was happening in 2015.

johnsutor• 2 years ago

There are plenty of "newer" technologies that closely mimic more "boring" tech too. For example, Svelte feels a lot like writing vanilla HTML and JS, Supabase is all built entirely on PostGRES instead of a shiny, noSQL database.

Spivak4• 2 years ago

I'm not really sure how you expected the mantra of use mature technologies that are stable, mostly unchanging, and have staying power could have turned out any other way. React Hooks which required a partial rewrite for every code base happened in React 16-17 which was in 2020. This is neither a boring or stable technology to build a business on. This doesn't mean it's bad but it doesn't survive the "I can pick the code up after a few years and get it up to date with minimal effort" test.

Write boring code is about going down paths that are well troddened enough that they paved a sidewalk which isn't going anywhere any time soon. Most of the frontend world can't even conceive of an LTS release right now.

I genuinely don't understand the author, choosing boring technology is about making choices so that that platform on which you stand is rock-solid. It's easier to exercise fun, creativity, and new ideas on such a platform because there aren't any sharp edges and you can start pushing a technology. The examples with introducing Kotlin or Python/PL seemingly aren't motivated by anything other than "they're new." What problem are they solving and do you have that problem?

root_axis8• 2 years ago

React Hooks which required a partial rewrite for every code base happened in React 16-17 which was in 2020

Except it was not required. Class components still work exactly as they did back then.

JohnBooty• 2 years ago

    It's easier to exercise fun, creativity, and new 
    ideas on such a platform because there aren't any 
    sharp edges and you can start pushing a technology.

Yeah. I don't interpret "use boring tech" as "literally don't use anything newer than 10 years old" or whatever.

You absolutely can/should/must use more exciting things if they are relevant to whatever unique problem you're trying to solve.

But everything else possible in your stack (particularly foundational elements) should be as boring as possible - i.e. unless you are specifically innovating in the area of RDBMS systems, you should be choosing a "boring" existing RDBMS.

givemeethekeys• 2 years ago

React to me will always feel like Java - a big solution by a big company for solving big company problems. When it is forced on small problems in small companies it creates unhappiness, yet, choosing something else feels like the "no one ever got fired for choosing IBM / Microsoft" dilemma.

root_axis8• 2 years ago

React isn't big, it's about as small as a "framework" gets. The problem most people face is actually that the simplicity gives the developer unlimited freedom to craft whatever complex monstrosity they desire.

hggigg3• 2 years ago

React is not boring. We have to use a 64 gig machine to build one of our React things and it takes 45 minutes to do so.

I'm literally on a meeting now trying to work out how to make it boring again.

Uehreka2• 2 years ago

That sounds like an architecture issue. In 10 years I’ve used React for a wide variety of projects from digital publishing tools to realtime medical dashboards to WebRTC-based videoconferencing apps with 3D graphics. I’ve never seen a build require anything like that much horsepower or time.

defofboring• 2 years ago

That’s the definition of boring in tech.

Before modern web dev practices my team was notified a dev had started the wipe/reinstall OS process on a 1,000 bare metal lab desktops and servers due to a bug in their deployment script

From prior experience I knew only the OS partition had been nuked so far not old data. So my team collected the disks, closed a campus computer, connected disks via USB adapters, shorted the two pins on ATX power supplies to provide power to the disks and booted from the lab machines it was all connected to into a live USB Linux system where we ran recovery tools on ~600-700 SATA disks (some servers had been snapshotted to backup and didn’t need the effort)

That was the most interesting day in tech I’ve ever worked and I started my career designing add on boards for a company that sold to Nortel before they imploded; my output literally shipped late 90s-early 00s internet users packets around

Noodling if else and for loops day in and day around some biz context I don’t care about but some Harvard grad has seed money to advertise is the lamest; the 2010s, an entire decade if my career and since, has been really boring.

emmanueloga_2• 2 years ago

I've been using preact and I think it fills the bill of "boring" (the "good" boring) a lot better [1].

1: https://preactjs.com/blog/preact-x

shepherdjerred• 2 years ago

100%

The biggest change in the last few years has been a shift from Webpack to Vite, which, IMO, is a breath of fresh air.

acaloiar• 2 years ago

To reduce "the boring revolution" to a React aversion is a bit dismissive.

"Boring" is malleable. If your team is full of React experts, React is boring.

If your team is full of backend-oriented engineers who rarely deal with the frontend, React is much less boring.

"Boring" is also not binary; it is continuous. The mix of technologies in your stack culminate in some arbitrary measure of boringness. This measure can also be thought of as the degree to which teams choose cutting/bleeding edge technologies. If the mix is mostly cutting/bleeding edge, it's very likely that production support is not boring, and problems operating the stack in production are not boring.

Choosing boring technology is also not a panacea that solves every team's problems. Although doing so likely mitigates them.

_ZeD_• 2 years ago

>> Wouldn’t folks feel better making smart, reasonable, and incremental improvements? Consider cases like introducing Kotlin to gradually level-up a Java shop.

while I could agree on the "principles", specifically for this example I still have scars. Too much costs, no much gain, and you end up with a single project (the first and last one) that no one want to touch and that will be the first to be "engineered back" to java - years later and with a lot of loss

adamc4• 2 years ago

I have seen this pattern many times. In some cases, we still have the "innovative" project, but it's now well behind the times, because no one wants to touch all the "innovative" (but poorly understood) code.

There is more than one cause, but an "innovative" project in 2010 might now just look like a trap with ancient technology. They often do not age well. So, if you aren't prepared to fail fast and rewrite them a few years later -- and many orgs are not -- this can be a problematic path.

"Mainstream" solutions may also be traps, but they are traps you can hire people to maintain or upgrade.

I think you can survive adopting, say, an unpopular language if you are willing to commit and hire-to-train for it, but it takes some focus and commitment, which can be difficult to get executive backing for in many shops. But one-off experiments with the tech stack can be risky unless you can really afford to rewrite failures promptly. FANGs can do this, of course, as can many Fortune 500 companies, but the majority of IT shops probably cannot.

4b11b4• 2 years ago

This author tries to make a claim but the argument involves too many things at once and isn't quite precise enough to make an impact statement.

alephnerd• 2 years ago

Hot take, but ime, a lot of developers who are hyper-luddites tend to not be good developers or developers who didn't/don't want to try to upskill.

This doesn't mean that you always need to use the newest and flashiest tool (eg. Bash+Awk preprocessing can still be faster than using multiple different packages), but you should still be aware and understand how to make those tradeoffs.

You choose your stack based on your problem statement, and as a business that requires taking both Engineering and Business considerations into account.

itsibitzi• 2 years ago

I would agree and expand on this and say such hyper-luddites tend to make picking up new technology a self-fulfilling bad idea. Even if you can present a fantastic business case for something they don't want to learn new things so if you do introduce it they will refuse to learn and progress will suffer as a result.

jappgar• 2 years ago

I think there are two poles that devs tend to cluster around.

On the luddite end, you have a lot of developers who are uncreative and vastly prefer reading code to writing it.

On the other end, you have rewriters who can ONLY read code they've written themselves.

You actually need both types to have a good team.

falcolas• 2 years ago

I'm a fan of the innovation token idea. You have n (where n is based on your team size) innovation tokens to make use of. They can be applied to your product, the technology used to build the product, or the infrastructure supporting the product.

Why is there a limit? Because budgets are limited, and products need to be completed.

robertclaus• 2 years ago

I totally agree. I felt like the author understood this but wrote in a style to be provocative. I didn't catch much in the article that was actually disagreeing with rolling out new technologies gradually.

For example, something like `What about a PostgreSQL operation rewriting SQL stored procedures in PL/Python?` is both provocative (there are good reasons not to thoughtlessly move all your stored procedures to PL/Python) but it's also absolutely a feature of Postgres a company should investigate and understand.

apothegm• 2 years ago

Yup.

And unless the project is something that nobody’s ever succeeded at in the past due to technical limitations, businesses tend to survive and thrive if they spend their innovation tokens on product instead of tech/infrastructure.

Sevii2• 2 years ago

There was no 'boring tech revolution'. Instead we got 10 years of NodeJS and React monocultures. We got 'let's build everything with Javascript' as the replacement for polygot microservices. We got 'everything must scale horizontally' despite computer hardware improving linearly.

The fact is that people are tired of meme driven architecture. I don't care that conferences and blogs gave you this great architecture idea. I've tried it before and it sucked. Most of my career has been spent arguing against people trying to expand the amount of work we need to do to accomplish business goals.

I know it's fun to try new languages and design concepts. I did it at the beginning of my career. Everyone should do it. But being a senior engineer is not your chance to try out your pet ideas. It's time to build things efficiently and economically.

potatohead00• 2 years ago

Besides. Let’s not take the fun out of everything.

there's nuance in everything. But this line is what gets me about this article. Let's not prioritize the "fun" of devs for unnecessary toil of ops/SRE.

emmanueloga_2• 2 years ago

BTW such a beautiful font. Anything you write with et book will look classy :-)

https://edwardtufte.github.io/et-book/

ilitirit• 2 years ago

I'm dealing with related issues at work right. Leadership is beating us over the head with the "innovation" hammer, without any consideration why and where they want to innovate. This mandate is a recipe for disaster in the hands of inexperienced tech-leads.

For example, there was an initiative to move from Talend to Azure Data Factory. Devs had to upskill, and it took them several months to deliver something that fails intermittently (with a huge cost behind it), and noone knows how to fix it.

I rewrote the pipeline in 2 hours (as simple Windows Service that parses a file and writes data to a DB), and polished it in around a day or so. Added some informative and error notifications, and we immediately saw benefits.

Innovation is fun, but some things just don't really need much of it. We've known how to do stuff like ETL for decades. We really don't need cloud-hosted solutions behind client secrets and gated services to load data into a DB.

Ironically, my boring solution seemed more "innovative" because users can now get customised notifications in different Teams Channels.

"Boring"/"exciting" tech isn't stifling or improving anything. These are orthoganal issues. Innovation can emerge from boring tech.

adamtaylor_13• 2 years ago

Dude took an isolated instance where a well-tested new material engineering technique was used to fix a bridge and actually made an argument against boring technology. Amazing.

I wholeheartedly disagree with the sentiment. However, I will point out that not all tech is built for all purposes.

Just like we wouldn’t praise I-95 being rebuilt with silly putty just because the engineers enjoyed working with silly putty. They used a well-designed solution for a fitting problem.

So too do we need to consider that boring technology is usually the RIGHT choice. But in instances where it’s not, or where it doesn’t matter: knock yourself out! Have fun!

neilv• 2 years ago

Namely, that an all-new construction material called Foamed Glass Gravel was used as infill during repair work. That is to say that the professionals in charge of rebuilding found a better way to do things than they’ve always been done. Moreover, those self-same professionals intentionally circumvented the slow supply chain to use the new-and-better thing.

This happens all the time in contemporary software.

But in the case of software, the scenario would be different: someone wants Foamed Glass Gravel on their resume, or as an accomplishment for their promo bid. So they do the free trial, and dump proprietary information into a Foamed Glass Gravel SaaS, and deploy a half-baked learning project. Then (most importantly) they hop jobs before the problems are obvious to everyone.

One difference is that, in the case of civil engineering, stakeholders care about maintenance problems and deaths, and the responsible engineers will be hunted down, to be sued and/or jailed. So, if a real engineer chose to sign off on something, it's probably legitimate and aligned.

ktosobcy3• 2 years ago

Wouldn’t folks feel better making smart, reasonable, and incremental improvements? Consider cases like introducing Kotlin to gradually level-up a Java shop.

I'm mostly a Java guy (with occasional dabbing in Python/Rust or some web-y stuff) and recently had to quickly jump into Kotlin codebase and I find it utterly clusterfuck-y... I may felt awesome in Java8 days ages ago but nowadays with nice, steady Java development I don't see much need or appeal of using Kotlin...

Boring Tech Is Stifling Improvement

Related Stories