This was written over a decade ago. I'd take it in that context. Lots of the tech they're talking about was being cargo culted en-masse.

So yes, pick boring tech, defined as the tech you know the sharp edges of.

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insanitybit 7 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't think that context is relevant to my comment. I didn't say "in hindsight, those technologies are great!", I pointed out that "boring" is meaningless, and any meaning you attribute to it like "defined as the tech you know the sharp edges of" is better substituted in.

That is, if someone said two sentences, I would only care about the second one:

1. "We should use this because it is boring"

2. "We should use this because we understand the sharp edges"

I wouldn't care at all about (1) and I'd have a real conversation based on (2).

Any productive conversation that starts with (1) immediately has to follow "can you clarify what that means", so the term is useless at best and thought terminating at worst.

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tp3358 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Isn't this somewhat semantical? Boring implies a lot of the things you said, especially if it means your team's experience is largely pooled in a particular dev environment. Assuming most boring tech is ubiquitous, it's probably rare that your team, statistically, is deeply literate in some obscure tech - they most likely are experts in some definition of "boring".

TLDR; #1 and #2 are essentially implying the same thing.

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dwattttt 4 hours ago | parent [-]

insanitybit's point is that "boring" can imply those things, but it can imply other things too. If you have to bring the correct context to make the word make sense, and there's other contexts that could apply that don't make sense, the word isn't helping. You bringing the correct context is doing the heavy lifting.

	▲	tp3358 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I guess context clues and the way the post was written had obvious implications - that was my point. I do understand it leaves a little open to interpretation, which is the angle he decided to comment on.