The Case for Boring Technology

## Boring is Beautiful I have seen startups fail. Not because of their technology choices. But technology choices accelerated the failure. ### The Pattern 1. New startup forms 2. Engineers excited about new tech 3. Kubernetes, microservices, event sourcing, GraphQL federation 4. 6 months later: debugging distributed systems instead of building product 5. Runway runs out ### The Alternative **Start boring. Get interesting later.** - PostgreSQL for everything (it can do more than you think) - Redis for caching and sessions - A single deployable monolith - Server-rendered HTML with progressive enhancement ### When To Get Interesting - When you have product-market fit - When you have paying customers - When you have actual scale problems (not theoretical ones) - When you have engineering bandwidth ### The Uncomfortable Truth Most startups never reach the scale where their technology choices matter. The ones that do? They can rewrite. Twitter started as a Rails monolith. Facebook started as PHP. ### My Recommendation Pick the most boring technology that could possibly work. Save your innovation tokens for product, not infrastructure. Your future self (and your investors) will thank you.