Why boring is good when building a company as a developer

Why are you telling me this?

We’ve been trained to always chase the new and are heavily biased to think that it’s better.

It’s called “Shiny Object Syndrome” and trust me I’ve fallen for it too but I wanna get you to think about why boring is good when it comes to technology choices for your business.

Background

I’m a dev myself and I think that we’re prone to jump on the next best stack or the next best framework, especially in web-dev land because there are like 500 frameworks that are being released every day.

I’ve written this lesson in blood for the first company I’ve founded a long time ago, we used a graph DB for our data store because I thought that it would be cool to fiddle around with this technology and it seemed a good fit for the product but here’s what problems it created:

• I needed to learn a new Query language
• We needed to host it ourselves because there were no cloud providers yet for that DB (As a small co DevOps is an unnecessary pain)
• We pivoted and the whole reason to use this DB (social networking) was not a core problem we were solving anymore and it became obsolete

Overall why it was fun to dabble with this it cost us a lot of time and it was objectively stupid to do this because we were not learning we were trying to solve a problem and run a business and it just got in the way.

All Tech in your business should enable you to do things faster/better not be a source of time waste

What can I do?

• At the expense of sounding like a tech boomer:
  Use the technology you know and that has been around for a bit, don’t go down the rabbit hole to pick up some new framework just for the sake of it when building a business, it’s fine if you want to learn but it’s not the right thing to do if you’re trying to iterate fast and get to product-market fit.
• Budget some time for small side projects with new tech, to learn it, to explore it, and figure out if it might be a good fit once it gets more mature, this will allow you to stay on top of what’s happening without risking your core product/mission.