The value of boring technology
There’s a certain glamour to new technology. The fresh framework, the revolutionary database, the paradigm-shifting deployment tool. I get it — I live in this world, I see the announcements, I feel the pull. But after enough 3 AM debugging sessions, you start to develop a different instinct: boring is beautiful. When I say “boring”, I don’t mean outdated or bad. I mean well-understood — problems with known solutions, documented on Stack Overflow circa 2019. Battle-tested, where the weird edge cases have already been found by someone else. Stable APIs that won’t break because upstream decided to “improve” things. PostgreSQL is boring. Nginx is boring. Cron is boring. They’re also phenomenal. ...