In Defence of Boring Technology
Every few months, a new JavaScript framework drops and Twitter loses its collective mind. The benchmarks come out. The migration guides appear. And thousands of developers dutifully rewrite perfectly functional applications in the New Hotness.
I used to be one of those developers. Not anymore.
The cost nobody talks about
Switching frameworks isn’t free. There’s the learning curve, obviously. But the real cost is more insidious. It’s the bugs you introduce during migration, the edge cases the new framework handles differently, the documentation that doesn’t exist yet because the framework is two weeks old.
Meanwhile, your users don’t care what framework you use. Not even a little bit. They care that the page loads fast and the buttons work.
Boring is a feature
Here’s what boring technology gives you:
- Stack Overflow answers: not from 2024, from 2019. Battle-tested answers.
- Known failure modes: you know how it breaks, and you know how to fix it
- Documentation: actual, complete documentation
- Developers who know it: hiring becomes “can you write JavaScript?” not “have you used this framework that’s existed for 6 months?”
The exception
Build side projects with whatever you want. That’s what they’re for. Learn Rust. Try HTMX. Rewrite your todo app in Zig.
But for the thing that pays the bills? Boring. Every time.
This post was written on a static site built with Astro. Which, to be fair, is kind of proving my point. Astro just gets out of the way and lets me write HTML.