Choose Boring Technology
4 hours ago
- #technology
- #innovation
- #software-engineering
- Dan McKinley discusses the concept of 'Choose Boring Technology', advocating for the use of mature, well-understood technologies over new and trendy ones.
- He shares personal anecdotes from his time at Etsy and other companies, highlighting the pitfalls of adopting new technologies without considering long-term maintenance costs.
- McKinley introduces the idea of 'innovation tokens', suggesting that companies have a limited capacity for innovation and should spend these tokens wisely.
- He emphasizes the importance of minimizing the number of technologies in a stack to reduce operational complexity and maintenance overhead.
- The talk critiques 'polyglot persistence', arguing that using multiple databases increases complexity without providing proportional benefits.
- McKinley shares a success story from Etsy, where using a shared stack (Memcached instead of Redis) allowed a feature to scale without additional operational work.
- He provides guidelines for when and how to introduce new technologies, stressing the importance of team discussions and low-risk experimentation.
- The conclusion reiterates the value of mastering a few tools, focusing on shipping products, and climbing Maslow's hierarchy of needs in a professional context.