Probably the single best thing to happen to me in my career was having had Kellan placed in charge of me. I learned a great deal from watching Kellan’s technical decisionmaking. In the year since leaving Etsy, my thoughts crystallized: embrace boredom.

Let’s say every company gets about three innovation tokens. If you choose Node JS or Mongo DB, you just spent one. If you write your own database, you’re in trouble. Boring technology like Postgres or Python is good because its failure modes are well understood. Unknown unknowns are larger with shiny new tech.

Adding technology comes with operations and cognitive overhead. The “best tool for the job” takes a myopic view. The long-term costs of keeping a system working reliably vastly exceed building inconveniences. Mature developers understand this.

Sometimes you need new tech, but first consider if you can solve the problem without adding anything. If you can’t, write down why. If new tech passes a gauntlet of questions, adding it is fine.