Choose Boring Technology
As a meta observation, I noticed this was submitted by user luu and his website also has a blog post with a similar theme (&quot;boring languages&quot;[1]).  Therefore, I wonder if the &quot;boring vs exciting&quot; advice somewhat depends on the personality.  I.e. if person has a tendency to prefer conservative technology, it means external advice that advocates &quot;boring tech&quot; will resonate with that person.<p>I think choosing boring technology makes sense but I&#x27;ll give a contrarian view anyway.<p>A lot of people like new and shiny things because it&#x27;s <i>interesting</i> and <i>spurs the imagination</i> for future work.<p>For example, in 1974 when the new Altair 8800 made the cover of Popular Electronics[2], an excited Paul Allen showed the magazine to a 19-year old Bill Gates.  The &quot;boring tech&quot; advocates would tell them they&#x27;re wasting their time with the &quot;new fad of microcomputers&quot; and they should look at boring IBM 360 mainframes instead.  Those IBM machines were around since the 1960s and were more proven.  The problem is that Bill and Paul <i>weren&#x27;t interested</i> in those mainframes.  The choice isn&#x27;t proven&#x2F;unproven. The choice was really interested&#x2F;uninterested.<p>Similar situation with WhatsApp in 2009.  Apple just released the iPhone SDK in 2008.  The older tech was PalmOS, Windows Mobile CE, and Symbian.  Those legacy mobile operating systems were around since the 1990s.  It didn&#x27;t matter to Jan Kuom that the new iPhone didn&#x27;t have a track record.  It was the more interesting platform to work on and he made a bet to write an app for it.<p>From what I read, Google&#x27;s first AdWords server in 2000 was built on MySQL.  MySQL was released in 1995 so using a relatively new 5-year old technology may have been more risky than picking traditional Oracle RDBMS which had been around since the late 1970s.<p>It&#x27;s ok to choose new and unproven tech if you have a coherent thesis of why it makes sense to try it.  You also have to be willing to pay the price if your bet turns out to be wrong.  You can also deliberately choose boring tech in as many areas as possible so it frees up brainpower to aggressively make a bet on new unproven tech in a particular area where you think it will make a difference.<p>Also, your role dictates the freedom to use new and unproven tech.  If you&#x27;re an employee at a mature and conservative company, you&#x27;ll be constrained to choose boring technology to minimize risk.  (This reinforces the saying, <i>&quot;Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.&quot;</i>)  On the other hand, if you&#x27;re an entrepreneur, there&#x27;s a good chance you&#x27;ll need to make a calculated risk with new exciting technology that is (1) unproven, (2) has non-existent documentation, (3) does not have much tooling to make implementation easy.<p>At one point, even all the &quot;boring technology&quot; was new and interesting.  In 2019, what&#x27;s some new and unproven tech that we should look at?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;danluu.com&#x2F;boring-languages&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;danluu.com&#x2F;boring-languages&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=altair+8800+magazine+cover&amp;source=lnms&amp;tbm=isch" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=altair+8800+magazine+cover&amp;s...</a>