I see innovation as a guardrail against CV driven development. More, I think you need to consider the context of when this was written. It was a period of rapid innovation/evolution - I remember more than a handful of projects failing (either undelivered or rewritten well under their expected lifecycle) around this time because teams had taken bets on new tech either they didn't know how to use well or the tech didn't take off and was a dead end.

> What if you know NodeJS really well?

Then you consider it boring. I'm sure Node and MongoDB were singled out by the author because at the time of writing they were still relatively new and undergoing periods of rapid development and change.

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insanitybit 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

CV driven development is just as well guarded against by asking someone to justify their technical decisions based on the requirements and how the solution meets them. So "boring" does nothing to further that.

> More, I think you need to consider the context of when this was written. It was a period of rapid innovation/evolution

It's linked today, people feel it's relevant today. This isn't a historic piece about how the tech industry used to be, people reference this post today.

> around this time because teams had taken bets on new tech either they didn't know how to use well or the tech didn't take off and was a dead end.

Yes, they should have had a discussion about their requirements and which technologies would have solved them.

> Then you consider it boring.

Then "boring" is useless and you should just say "I know this technology well and it maps to our use case well" and be able to justify that.

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jonahx 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> CV driven development is just as well guarded against by asking someone to justify their technical decisions based on the requirements and how the solution meets them. So "boring" does nothing to further that.

It doesn't though. It's very easy to manufacture reasons why "shiny new thing" is the objectively right fit for something, even when it's not.

The word "boring" is well-chosen because it's addressing a bias most engineers have towards the interesting and new. It's a reminder: that fun new tech you really want to try here may not be, probably isn't, the cold-hearted best choice, if you're being practical and business-minded.

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i_like_robots 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You seem to agree with the lecture/article but disagree with the title.

However, it's influenced a lot of people for more than a decade and the snippy title might well have something to do with that.

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insanitybit 6 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't agree with the article though and I dislike the influence it has had. I have seen engineers use "Boring" to justify "I know this technology" for situations where that technology is a bad fit.

Conversations about technical solutions are bespoke, there is no one term that can or should be used to guide them.

	▲	i_like_robots 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Poor choices whether influenced by this article or engineers chasing CV points are no different. Boring technology is a tool or communication device like any other. I hope in your situation you were able to influence the engineers utilising it poorly to reconsider.

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mr_toad 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

My recollection is that MongoDB was based on CouchDB, except they dispensed with Erlang & JSON and went with more conventional technology.