Top all-time · #392
Dan McKinley
Personal blog · mcfunley.com · on HN as mcfunleyprogrammingproductivity
Dan McKinley's personal blog at mcfunley.com covers programming and productivity. Since 2012, 140 different Hacker News readers have linked it 200 times, most often “Choose Boring Technology (2015)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-01-10, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 11 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Dan McKinley's 'Choose Boring Technology' essay, which argues for limiting new technology choices in a project (innovation tokens).
- Recommended for · 11 comments
- One says 'I love this advice'; another calls it 'important writing', a third an 'excellent opinion piece'.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Choose Boring Technology (2015)78 people · 96 mentions · first linked 2019-03-15
- Choose Boring Technology21 people · 26 mentions · first linked 2015-03-30
- Whom the Gods Would Destroy, They First Give Real-Time Analytics6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2022-02-18
- Thoughts on the Technical Track6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2014-12-09
- Design for Continuous Experimentation (why you should avoid infinite scrolling)5 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2013-06-19
- Do you work at Amazon?5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2016-01-26
- Whom the Gods Would Destroy, They First Give Real-Time Analytics (2013)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2013-01-09
- I Tried to Use AI to Read an AI Book3 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2024-06-10
- From the Annals of Dubious Achievement (2009)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-06-18
- Dan McKinley: The Guerilla's Guide to Influencing Leadership2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-12-02
What Hacker News says?
An older piece that I loved is Dan's point on just allowing a certain number of technology tokens in any project: https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology I think one big part of the mistake is using Hacker News, Reddit, conferences as a sign of what companies are actually using. Instead, I liken it to a bazaar: https://www.nemil.com/on-software-engineering/beware-enginee... Oh, and remember marketing is not re…
Comment linking /choose-boring-technology
on “Choose Boring Technology”Submitted Choose Boring Technology as a story · 577 points
HN discussionA lot of people are going to jump on the "he used k8s and he doesn't even work at Google scale!" part of this writeup, but I think it's a perfect demonstration of the concept of innovation tokens [1]. He admits in TFA that clickhouse was the only new piece of tech in his stack, and he was already familiar with k8s et al - so he's able to focus on actually building the products he wants. I could see somebody unfamili…
Comment linking /choose-boring-technology
on “The architecture behind a one-person tech startup”Submitted Choose Boring Technology (2015) as a story · 459 points
HN discussionAre you sure that's not a catch-22? The reason you've not seen any good PWAs is because the ecosystem doesn't exist for making good PWAs, which doesn't exist because there aren't any good PWAs. Any sane technologist is going to look at the shortcomings of PWAs, and choose a different technology to build their app. Choose boring technology[0], and unless your product is a PWA toolkit, the app UI library isn't the pla…
Comment linking /choose-boring-technology
on “Private client-side-only PWAs are hard, but now Apple made them impossible”Submitted Whom the Gods Would Destroy, They First Give Real-Time Analytics (2013) as a story · 291 points
HN discussionI love this advice. Here is a blog post that I keep coming back to regarding this. http://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology
Comment linking /choose-boring-technology
on “Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers”Submitted Whom the Gods Would Destroy, They First Give Real-time Analytics as a story · 186 points
HN discussionEven with a clean slate, there's immense value in choosing something that you already know to be a tried-and-true approach - i.e. in choosing "boring" technology¹ instead of trying to be at the cutting edge. Now if exploring the cutting edge is a goal of yours in and of itself, then by all means blow some of those innovation tokens on the new Reactangular.ts hotness. For a lot of projects, though, the goal is to get…
Comment linking /choose-boring-technology
on “The Future of Htmx”Submitted Why MongoDB Never Worked Out at Etsy as a story · 137 points
HN discussionThink this article is a different variation on the same theme. https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology
Comment linking /choose-boring-technology
on “Simple Systems Have Less Downtime”Submitted Google Reader Killed RSS as a story · 80 points
HN discussioni really don't know a ton about this product or team but it sounds like if they had used aurora mysql or aurora postgres in the first place then there would be nothing to write a blog post about because it would've just worked and kept working. they say they want to avoid vendor lock-in but if the vendor became a real issue they'd be doing their first migration instead of being on v3 already. additionally, their bes…
Comment linking /choose-boring-technology
on “A database for 2022”Submitted Scalding at Etsy as a story · 74 points
HN discussionFor anyone else curious, I found the postmortem here: https://mcfunley.com/why-mongodb-never-worked-out-at-etsy Which was compiled here: https://github.com/icy/w2w
Comment linking /why-mongodb-never-worked-out-at-etsy
on “Choose Boring Technology (2015)”Submitted Choose Boring Technology (2015) as a story · 42 points
HN discussionChoose boring technology [0]. For me, the choice is a trade off between the journey and the destination. Destination is the final objective of your project, business value or whatever. The journey is tinkering with "stuff". Depending on the project there's value and enjoyment in both. [0]: https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology
Comment linking /choose-boring-technology
on “Ask HN: Who operates at scale without containers?”Submitted Are My Push Notifications Driving Users Away? as a story · 42 points
HN discussionWell, yes. Mature, boring technology. I meant it in the sense of this essay[1]. [1] https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology
Comment linking /choose-boring-technology
on “Rails 6.0”Submitted Choose Boring Technology: Expanded, Slide-Based Edition as a story · 38 points
HN discussion> What the author should focus on is the lack of agility that prevents companies from experimenting and failing quickly. Wow weird someone should totally think about that, maybe it doesn't even have much to do with the programming language http://mcfunley.com/data-driven-products-now http://mcfunley.com/design-for-continuous-experimentation
Comment linking /design-for-continuous-experimentation
on “Choose Boring Technology”Submitted Data-Driven Products (2014) [video] as a story · 34 points
HN discussionK8s absolutely has a steep learning curve, but it feels like we always focus on the most complex setups and use cases so that we can admire the shiniest new features. If you're going from "our app is running directly in tomcat in our on-prem data center" to "we want to move to a mirco-services architecture with a service mesh, canary deployments, multi-cluster observability, fault injection, automatic global failove…
Comment linking /choose-boring-technology
on “Google admits Kubernetes container tech is too complex”Submitted Do you work at Amazon? as a story · 31 points
HN discussionSome interesting thoughts on a similar sentiment: http://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology Nice takeaway: "The nice thing about boringness (so constrained) is that the capabilities of these things are well understood. But more importantly, their failure modes are well understood."
Comment linking /choose-boring-technology
on “Happiness is a Boring Stack”Submitted Whom the Gods Would Destroy, They First Give Real-Time Analytics as a story · 17 points
HN discussionI think every cohort of software engineers learns this in their own way. I wrote this three years ago. Chasing the Shiny and New in Software https://www.nemil.com/musings/shinyandnew.html “I worry that some programmers (and their employers) have this attitude, namely a focus on transitioning stacks to the newest. They pick companies primarily based on the framework, aiming for the latest instead of the best tool for…
Comment linking /choose-boring-technology
on “Stop Learning Frameworks”Submitted On Misery as a story · 15 points
HN discussionIn this regard I think the remarks of McKinley's "Choose Boring Technology" [1,2] is quite relevant. [1]: http://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology-slides [2]: http://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology
Comment linking /choose-boring-technology
on “Why Docker Is Not Yet Succeeding Widely in Production”Submitted Whom the Gods Would Destroy, They First Give Real-time Analytics as a story · 14 points
HN discussion
