Boring technology ages well

Open a web page written in the 1990s and it will very likely still work. The layout may look dated, but the text appears, the links can be clicked and nothing needs to be installed. Few other kinds of software can say the same after thirty years.

Why simple things last

A piece of software lasts as long as everything it depends on keeps working. Each dependency is a promise made by someone else: that a service will stay online, that a library will be maintained, that a format will still be readable.

Plain technology makes few such promises.

<article>
  <h1>A heading</h1>
  <p>A paragraph that any browser can display.</p>
</article>

That fragment depends on a browser and nothing else. There is no build step to break and no account to expire.

The cost of the interesting choice

New tools are attractive because they solve a real problem elegantly. They also arrive with unknowns. Nobody yet knows how they fail, how they behave under load, or whether they will be maintained in five years.

A useful habit is to treat novelty as a budget. A project can afford one or two unproven choices in the places where they make a real difference. Everywhere else, the dull and well-understood option is the one that lets you sleep.

Boring is not the same as old

This is not an argument against progress. It is an argument for asking a specific question before adopting something: what will this need from me in three years?

A blog is a good example. The words are the part that matters and they should outlive whatever is used to display them. Keeping articles as plain text files means the site around them can be rebuilt many times without losing a sentence.