# Choose Boring Technology

A blog post from 2015 which made some rounds back then around HackerNews and keeps regularly resurfacing. I guess this is either obvious, or at leat familiar stuff to anybody long enough in the business to keep a couple of project corpses in the attic together with the corresponding deep scars on one's engineering soul.

https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology
and
http://boringtechnology.club/

_"Boring is good. Pick where you chase shiny uplands carefully."_

I internalised this over the years deeply. And I think it paid off well so far. Engaging in a deep/hi-tech endeavour, one needs to focus their energy on that one difficult thing you want/need to do and keep the rest preferrably out of the way. _Boring is difficult enough_, no need to make one's life harder than it is.

And of course the uncertainty:

> The nice thing about boringness (so constrained) is that the capabilities of these things are well understood. But more importantly, their failure modes are well understood.

The metaphor of a very limited number of innovation tokens is very useful.

> 1. Let’s say every company gets about three innovation tokens. You can spend these however you want, but the supply is fixed for a long while.
> 2. Adding technology to your company comes with a cost.
> 3. Choose New Technology, Sometimes.

#engineering