I recently re-read Dan McKinley's classic essay "Choose Boring Technology" and it resonated even more now than when I first read it.
Every new technology you adopt has a hidden cost — the unknown unknowns. PostgreSQL might not be as exciting as the latest distributed database, but you know its failure modes.
In my current role, we've standardized on Rails, PostgreSQL, and Redis. Nothing fancy, but we ship fast and debug easily.
Does anyone else intentionally choose 'boring' tech?
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Strongly agree. At my last job we adopted a new database, a new message queue, AND a new deployment platform all in the same quarter. It was chaos.
There's a corollary: you get a limited number of 'innovation tokens.' Spend them where they give you a genuine competitive advantage, not on your deployment pipeline.
As someone early in their career, this is reassuring. I always felt behind for not knowing the latest framework.