~/talk

A Plea for Boring Tech

Talkat SeattleJS Conf 2023 · on Tuesday, 2023-08-08· [engineering-leadership]
slides:none on file

Argues that production systems use the most boring reliable tech so teams spend time building features not fighting the stack, citing costly rewrites, pagerduty-driven outages and information bottlenecks when one or two people own a new stack. Gives a concrete win: 30+ teams at IBM successfully adopt GraphQL after heavy work and interop payoff. Proposes a risk checklist with CHAOS: complex hazardous aspirational opaque speculative and recommends assessing retraining, infra, ownership and real user value before introducing novelty.

AI-written summary · about

  1. 0:00Intro
  2. 1:12Two Wolves at Battle
  3. 2:58Boring is for Builders
  4. 5:59Embrace Chaos
  5. 12:42Types of Excitement
  6. 13:52The Hard Way
  7. 15:10Sides of Shipping
  8. 17:20Balance
  9. 18:26Risk Assessment
  10. 18:50Outreach
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