4 items tagged “boringtechnology”
2024
Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology. Gunpei Yokoi’s product design philosophy at Nintendo (“Withered” is also sometimes translated as “Weathered”). Use “mature technology that can be mass-produced cheaply”, then apply lateral thinking to find radical new ways to use it.
This has echos for me of Dan McKinley’s “Choose Boring Technology”, which argues that in software projects you should default to a proven, stable stack so you can focus your innovation tokens on the problems that are unique to your project. # 14th March 2024, 4:13 am
2021
Porting VaccinateCA to Django
As I mentioned back in February, I’ve been working with the VaccinateCA project to try to bring the pandemic to an end a little earlier by helping gather as accurate a model as possible of where the Covid vaccine is available in California and how people can get it.
[... 2157 words]Getting started
Here we go then... I’ve signed up to work on this project full-time, four days a week!
[... 609 words]2019
Choose Boring Technology (via) The definitive write-up of Dan McKinley’s presentation on why you should mostly use “boring” technology rather than going after the latest shiniest stack components. There’s so much accumulated wisdom in here. I particularly like how Dan owns up to having introduced Scala and MongoDB at Etsy before eventually helping remove them and go back to something less exciting and far more predictable. Also neat: the site is generated using Dan’s better-keynote-export tool which helps turn Keynote presentations into a flat web page with notes and images. # 3rd July 2019, 6:09 pm