Dan McKinley is an experienced developer who’s worked at Etsy, Stripe and other companies where technology choices were still “in flux” while he was there. He’s written an essay and given a talk on the philosophy of choosing boring technology.
His theory is that companies or teams have a limited number of “innovation tokens” to spend on new, shiny technologies, and overspending that budget can result in too much risk, too many unknowns and too much operational overhead maintaining all of the relatively unstable new technologies introduced. In his talk he also looks at strategies for choosing tech, and introduces a kind of cost function to help people evaluate when it might be worth adding something new to the mix, and when it might be best to stick with the tried and tested tools — even if they’re not necessarily the right tool for the job.
It’s a really great talk, and you should definitely at least go browse his slides!
His final takeaway is also worth ending this post on: “Happiness comes from shipping meaningful work.”