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Being Boring

Loved this Wired story that talks about something I care about a great deal - stability over disruption in technology. Among the work I have done for clients over the years, I am most proud of things are the normal, boring and reliable. They could use it for years and not even notice the thing existed - it just hummed away in the background and improved what they did or allowed them to focus on their strengths rather than battle with non-core functions. 

The boring stuff lives on for ever, fads come and go in cycles of two to five years, the Kool-Aid of the day generates buzz, conference keynotes and such but inevitably the hype will fade and folks will turn to tried and true. I never saw the point of random new technology certifications - its like requiring a chef who went to culinary school for years and ran a restaurant for a decade to prove that they can follow a certain recipe. 

There is a level of stupid such requirement exceeds and I find it impossible to condone. Ask developers to learn foundational things that matter no matter what the current fad is - underlying all the new and shiny is the old and dull stuff no one wants to talk about:

The world of technology is infinite and exhausting, and everyone will tell you their giant thing is the real next thing. But you can always see the big, boring, true future of the field by looking at the on-ramps—the code schools, the certificate programs, the “master it in 30 days” books. One year everyone was learning Rails at coding boot camps. Then it was JavaScript. Then many of the boot camps closed, and now it's DevOps (software development plus IT operations). These are the things the industry needs right now, on a two- to five-year horizon. And stick around long enough and you'll find a lot of old Unix code and Java beneath the new stuff—dull systems, a stable stack of technologies so reliable that we forget them.

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