Boring Tech Is Stifling Improvement

The post uses the I-95 collapse repair as an example of professionals choosing a better material and bypassing a slow supply chain to reopen the road quickly. It then applies that contrast to software, where the author argues that “boring technology” is useful but can be pushed too far.

Reading notes

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• The I-95 repair used foamed glass gravel as infill, showing that the people in charge found a better way to do the work and deliberately avoided the slow supply chain.
• The author links this example to software and says the “boring technology movement” borrows from the 2015 “Choose Boring Technology” essay and its deck.
• The manifesto’s ideas about an innovation token, operability, and unfamiliarity are presented as useful.
• The author argues that too many different tools can be a problem, but a one-size-fits-all single tool can be extreme in the other direction.
• Monocultures can create a single point of failure, vendor lock-in, and missed savings from competition among vendors.
• Overreliance on boring tech can drain enjoyment from the work and turn away people who are excited about computing.
• It can also chill innovation by discouraging deviation from existing practice.
• It can produce stagnation by making teams overlook better ways of doing things and by privileging the familiar over progress.
• The author gives examples of incremental improvement such as introducing Kotlin into a Java shop and rewriting stored procedures in PL/Python.
• The conclusion is that the original manifesto has value, but teams should not over-index on the current state and lose chances to improve.