Boring Technologies
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Programming is a Pop Culture - Baldur Bjarnason
- The programming pop culture favors specific code aesthetics based on the trends of the day
- The issue is that the programming pop culture demands that code exhibit the latest popular aesthetics of rigor, formality, and cleverness
- It didn't matter if you were writing in Ruby, JavaScript, or Objective-C. Your code had to have a level of magic to it. Metaprogramming, syntax-hacking languages to create ad hoc Domain-Specific Languages, tricks with extreme late binding, and more were frequent topics on developer weblogs and forums
- A part of this trend is the unpopularity of the approaches and languages seen as less rigorous. CSS is dropped in favor of statically typed CSS-in-JS methods. HTML is dropped in favor of a strict inline XML-like markup format called JSX
Your tech stack is not the product
- At most software startups, customers typically don't care if your product runs on Heroku, Kubernetes, or a brittle singly-homed machine in Joe's closet
- No purchasing decisions hinge on your commitment to write servers in Rust or use Nix for hermetic everything
- Customers want software that delivers problem-solving impact
- But there are many instances where an innocent, ill-considered early decision turned out much worse over the longer term. It becomes a time-sucking, success-hindering mess requiring costly correction later
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