In praise of boring engineering

The best compliment a system can get is silence. If nobody talks about it during on-call, it is doing its job.

Boring is a decision

The excitement of a new architecture lasts weeks; its maintenance lasts years. We prefer technologies with a proven record of boredom.

• SQL before NoSQL when the data is relational.
• Modular monoliths before microservices without a platform team.
• Standard libraries before shiny dependencies.

How we measure it

Our goal is not zero incidents — that is impossible — but incidents that never repeat. Every post-mortem must produce an action that makes that class of failure impossible.

Boredom is the cheapest form of reliability.