Embrace Boredom.
Let's say every company gets about three innovation tokens. You can spend these however you want, but the supply is fixed for a long while. You might get a few more after you achieve a certain level of stability and maturity, but the general tendency is to overestimate the contents of your wallet. Clearly this model is approximate, but I think it helps.If you choose to write your website in NodeJS, you just spent one of your innovation tokens. If you choose to use MongoDB, you just spent one of your innovation tokens. If you choose to use service discovery tech that's existed for a year or less, you just spent one of your innovation tokens. If you choose to write your own database, oh god, you're in trouble.
Any of those choices might be sensible if you're a javascript consultancy, or a database company. But you're probably not. You're probably working for a company that is at least ostensibly rethinking global commerce or reinventing payments on the web or pursuing some other suitably epic mission. In that context, devoting any of your limited attention to innovating ssh is an excellent way to fail. Or at best, delay success [1].
What counts as boring? That's a little tricky. "Boring" should not be conflated with "bad." There is technology out there that is both boring and bad [2]. You should not use any of that. But there are many choices of technology that are boring and good, or at least good enough. MySQL is boring. Postgres is boring. PHP is boring. Python is boring. Memcached is boring. Squid is boring. Cron is boring.
The nice thing about boringness (so constrained) is that the capabilities of these things are well understood. But more importantly, their failure modes are well understood. Anyone who knows me well will understand that it's only with a overwhelming sense of malaise that I now invoke the spectre of Don Rumsfeld, but I must.
Why discouraging cleverness is important in programming languages and codebases.
One of the other benefits of Go was widening the pool of backgrounds we can hire. We can take someone from any language background and have them ramped up on Go in weeks. With the Scala side there’s the JVM learning curve, the Java world of containers, black magic of JVM tuning etc…
New developers we’ve hired are ramped up in weeks vs months. We now have the majority of our services written in Go and one of the last holdouts to move to Go just wrote his first project and said to me afterward “Wow, I read through that library once and I knew exactly what it was doing , I’ve read the Scala version of that library four times and I still have no idea what it does, I can see why you guys like it so much”. That was one of our senior engineers who’s previously worked for one of the largest web properties in the world. This process was a complete bottoms up initiative from our development team who pushed for the move to Go.
We now process hundreds of thousands of messages per second and Terabytes of data per day with our GoLang services.
I’m not here to bash Scala, or ScalaZ (I love ValidationNel! ) but more to give some real world context of Scala in a production environment over 7 years with two companies. I still use Scala and love hacking in Scalding. Some of our more ambitious projects coming up will most likely be Scala based but I’m just not as sold on it anymore as the core language when trying to scale a growing engineering team. Go has since become my personal language of choice.
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