Boring technology

Choose technologies that are well-understood, widely deployed, and unsexy. Save your innovation budget for what matters.

Innovation tokens

Dan McKinley proposes that every project gets a limited number of "innovation tokens." Each novel technology choice spends a token. Spend them all on infrastructure and you have none left for the actual product.

The corollary: be boring on purpose. Use the database everyone uses. Pick the framework with the most Stack Overflow answers. Choose the cloud provider your team already knows.

Why boring works

Boring technology has had its bugs discovered and fixed. Its failure modes are documented. There are blog posts explaining how to scale it and consultants who've done it before.

New technology is exciting precisely because it's unproven. That excitement comes at the cost of unknown risks, missing documentation, and problems no one has solved yet.

When to innovate

Sometimes new technology solves a real problem that old technology can't. Sometimes the benefits are worth the risks.

The key is making that choice deliberately. Don't use new technology because it's new. Use it because you've thought hard about the tradeoffs and decided it's worth the tokens.