The case for boring technology
After 25 years in software, I've come to a perhaps controversial conclusion: the best engineering choice is usually the dullest one.
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Why we chase new things
Every year brings a new framework, a new paradigm, a new reason to rewrite everything we built last year. The pull is real — new tools often are genuinely better, and keeping up matters. But there's a difference between deliberate adoption and reflexive novelty-seeking.
I've watched teams spend months migrating to a new stack only to discover the bottleneck was never the technology — it was the process, the communication, or the requirements.
What "boring" actually means
Boring technology isn't old technology. It's technology with a long track record, a large community, clear failure modes, and well-understood operational characteristics. It's the tool where Stack Overflow has ten answers to every question you'll have at 2am.
The goal isn't to use old tools. It's to use tools you understand well enough to reason about under pressure.
A few principles I've landed on
- Prefer the tool your team already knows over the marginally better one they don't.
- Introduce one new thing at a time, so you know what broke it when something goes wrong.
- New technology earns its place by solving a specific problem you actually have — not one you might have.
- If you can't explain why you're adopting something, you're probably chasing novelty.
The exception
None of this means "never change anything." The point is intentionality. When I moved our team at AppBrilliance to GitLab CI/CD with reusable components, it was because we had a real problem — deployment inconsistency — and the tool directly addressed it. The boredom came later, when it just worked.
That's the goal: infrastructure so reliable it becomes invisible.