5 min
The Case for Boring Tools
Boring tools are how you ship things that last. The novelty tax is real, and you pay it on every project.
There's a tension in every codebase between using the new shiny tool and using the boring one that's been around for ten years.
I've ended up on the side of boring tools, almost always. Postgres over the trendy NoSQL of the year. Express or Nest over whatever framework launched last month. React over the latest signal-based experiment.
It's not because the new things are bad. It's because the cost of a tool isn't the time to learn it — it's the time to debug it at 2 AM, the size of the community when you have a problem, and the question of whether it'll still exist in three years.
#Engineering#Tooling
