// Published on
In praise of boring engineering
The most valuable systems are the ones nobody notices. This is how we design for boredom.
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.
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