You seem to agree with the lecture/article but disagree with the title.
However, it's influenced a lot of people for more than a decade and the snippy title might well have something to do with that.
You seem to agree with the lecture/article but disagree with the title.
However, it's influenced a lot of people for more than a decade and the snippy title might well have something to do with that.
I don't agree with the article though and I dislike the influence it has had. I have seen engineers use "Boring" to justify "I know this technology" for situations where that technology is a bad fit.
Conversations about technical solutions are bespoke, there is no one term that can or should be used to guide them.
Poor choices whether influenced by this article or engineers chasing CV points are no different. Boring technology is a tool or communication device like any other. I hope in your situation you were able to influence the engineers utilising it poorly to reconsider.
The point is exactly that - bad decisions happen when your reasoning is based on silly terms like "boring" or "hyped" or whatever. The solution is to discuss the merits of each solution as it pertains to the problem space, which "boring" does not help with (and obfuscates).
While it shouldn't be the absolute guide for every technical decision, it helps to have abstractions to capture the intuition and years of experience that goes into choosing a solution. It can make the discussions smoother.
When I'm discussing technical solutions with colleagues, especially senior ones, I can point to a tech being "boring" and they'll know exactly what I mean - that choosing it will probably mean better support, smoother rollout, established patterns, etc. I don't have to redefine that criteria every single time.
There are scenarios where all that criteria is met but it's still a bad fit. Boring <> Not boring becomes a trade-off scale. There are understood costs that come with choosing a tech that's not boring and I don't have to explain why.
If an engineer fails to see the nuance then that's a communication issue and I think they'd probably be a hard person to work with regardless if this article existed.
> When I'm discussing technical solutions with colleagues, especially senior ones, I can point to a tech being "boring" and they'll know exactly what I mean - that choosing it will probably mean better support, smoother rollout, established patterns, etc. I don't have to redefine that criteria every single time.
I don't think that boring means any of those things. Most people here don't seem to agree with it meaning those things either.
> If an engineer fails to see the nuance then that's a communication issue and I think they'd probably be a hard person to work with regardless if this article existed.
It seems way harder to work with a group of people who all seem to know their in-group definition of a term and resent the idea of just using explicit descriptions that map.
I'm sorry but it doesn't seem like you've actually read, or at least internalized, the article? These are direct quotes:
> The nice thing about boringness (so constrained) is that the capabilities of these things are well understood. But more importantly, their failure modes are well understood.
Well understood software directly coincides with support, rollout, and patterns.
I've read it a dozen times at least since it's been released. I don't think you're understanding my criticism. The payoff of the article is and has been that people say "choose boring technology", which is bad. The substance of the article is that "boring" is a valuable proxy word for things that may actually have value, which is a bad thing.
This article is bad. It has led to bad things. It has a bad premise. It has bad ideas.
The correct solution to the problem it wants to address is that engineers should justify technical solutions by mapping product level issues to technical solutions.
That's it.