Choosing Boring Technology

Choosing boring technology is a mindset that a senior engineer should have. In this article, we will use the example of the ExplainThis website redesign to talk about what is choosing boring technology? And why do it?

What is Boring Technology? Why choosing it?

Boring technology is technology that is well-established, well-understood, and has a large community of users and developers. It is not the latest and greatest, but it is reliable and predictable.

There are several reasons why you might choose boring technology:

• Stability: Boring technologies are usually more stable and reliable than new, cutting-edge technologies. This is because they have been around for longer and have had more time to be tested and debugged.
• Support: Boring technologies are usually better supported than new technologies. This means that there is more documentation, more community support, and more third-party tools and libraries available.
• Cost: Boring technologies are usually less expensive than new technologies. This is because they are more mature and there is more competition among vendors.

Case Study: ExplainThis Website Revamp

In 2023, if you want to choose to set up your own content-based self-media website, the front-end framework choice is either Astro, which allows you to ship with zero JavaScript, or VitePress, which is based on Vite and provides an excellent development experience and performance. Or, if you want to write in React with RSC, you should choose Next 13. Why would anyone use an old tech like Next 12?

We choose Next 12 because when we first wrote the ExplainThis website, we relied heavily on TailwindUI, which is written in Next, for style design, and Next was still at version 12 at that time. Then you might ask, since the website is going to be redesigned, why not just upgrade to Next 13 or rewrite it with Astro?

The main reason is that the migration cost far outweighs the value that can be gained. Our desktop has the most traffic, the Lighthouse score using Next 12 is already good enough (see the figure below). At least in terms of performance, best practices, and SEO, it is full marks. It is not practical for us to spend a lot of time migrating.

Whether it is upgrading to Next 13 or migrating to Astro, it will take several more weeks. It is better to spend this time creating more valuable content than to make the website 0.1 seconds faster. You should note that if your website is not running fast, it is very necessary to improve the performance. We choose not to do so because our website performance was already good enough, making the marginal benefit low for us.

Customer needs are more important than the technology

Kelsey Hightower, a former Google Distinguished Engineer, once said, "Stick to boring architecture for as long as possible, and spend the majority of your time, and resources, building something your customers are willing to pay for."

Addy Osmani, the current DX Lead for Google Chrome, interprets this quote as "strategic progression." This means when choosing new technologies, we should consciously weigh whether the new technology choice will ultimately bring value to users, rather than using new technologies for the sake of using them.

Back to the ExplainThis website, if we were to start from scratch and write a content-based website with relatively low interactivity, we would definitely not choose Next 12. After all, those zero JavaScript frameworks in the community are really powerful. However, for a website that has been online for a while, after evaluation, we still choose to continue using boring technologies.

As for what technology you should choose to build your website, it depends on your needs and cost-benefit analysis. Even using WordPress is not bad, and even now, many people use Notion to build a simple but clear page, which are also good choices. In the end, the key to technology is still to serve your customer needs.

Conclusion

In general, it is a good idea to choose boring technologies whenever possible. This will help you to build a more reliable, maintainable, and cost-effective website.

Of course, there are also some downsides to using boring technologies. They may not be as exciting or as feature-rich as new technologies. However, the benefits of stability, support, and cost usually outweigh the downsides.

If you are looking for a reliable and predictable solution, then boring technology is a good option.