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You Should Build your Next App on a Boring Stack
Developers love new shiny things. And in technology the past few years, there has been no shortage of shinies. Depending on the ecosystem you are working in, there are new frameworks coming out at a rapid pace. Shiny things are nice, and using the latest and greatest technology in your applications is a great way to achieve technological advantage over your competition.
But no matter how nice shiny things are, I believe you should develop your next application on a strictly boring stack, unless you are prepared to get up in the middle of the night to fix a stack you barely know. I’ll tell you a story I’m not particularly proud of, but one that proved to be an invaluable lesson.
That one time it couldn’t fail
About four years ago, I was working for a small startup company as a software engineer. The company wasn’t doing particularly well, and the product my team was working on was going to be the tide turner.
We had that startup mentality of always building software using the latest and greatest technologies. Around that time, that meant leaving the old fashioned SQL databases behind and moving to a NoSQL data model. That choice made a fair amount of sense, since the data we were processing wasn’t strictly relational.
