Choose Boring Technology

The .club Club

Hey

I’m Dan McKinley. That’s me in the hole. It’s a metaphor.

I work for a company called Mailchimp, or Mailkimp if you listen to podcasts. I was an early employee at Etsy, and that was a formative experience for me, so I’ll refer to my time there a lot. But I’ve worked for a few other places since.

I’ve worked at big companies and at smaller ones, and at my own tiny startups. I’ve noticed a few things.

Big companies can have a branded way of doing engineering. For example, “The Etsy Way” of doing engineering became a thing. Living inside of that box where your needs are met and questions are answered can spoil you somewhat.

But I’ve also been in situations where “the way engineering is done” is actively being figured out, or in periods of transition. And in those situations I’ve had to ponder a couple of questions.

First, how do you pick the tools you’re going to use to get your work done?

Another question I care about is: how do you make developers happy? This matters to me, as a developer. I would like to be happy, if possible.

If you go up to a developer and say, “hey, what would make you happy?” you often get highly specific answers. “I would be happy if I could write Clojure at work,” they’ll say, “so you should let me do my work in Clojure.” I don’t discount that when they do this, developers are genuinely describing some kind of endorphin-rich experience they have had at some point.

However, I am skeptical that the state that they’re describing is the highest level of spiritual attainment possible.

But I, too, was once like this.

Etsy for example, early on, was a big ball of PHP spaghetti. It was written by someone that was unfortunately learning PHP as he was writing it.

I spent several years just trying to avoid dealing with it. At one point I tried building Scala services that talked to MongoDB. I thought this would result in better infrastructure, solve all of my productivity problems, and would make me happy. But no part of that turned out to be the case.

The embarrassing wreckage of this period is still on the internet, you can go find it and make fun of me. And Etsy employees still give me shit about it, with good cause.

When I had my own startup last, I did use Clojure. I don’t think that Clojure is the reason, but I should disclaim here that that startup is no longer in business.

Anyway I want to offer these anecdotes as my non-luddite bona fides. I am not someone that has never experienced the joy of functional programming.

You don’t need to @ me to talk about Scala or Haskell. You certainly don’t need to do that with a rebuttal taking all of this extremely personally, even though I haven’t even mentioned you or those languages at all, Steve.

But anyway, despite that, I’m mostly not a tool-obsessed engineer. My other talks are barely even about engineering.

I don’t think I’ve become that way because I’ve gotten old and cranky. Although I am certainly those things, I think I’ve gotten perspective on this by summiting Maslow’s hierarchy at some point in my past.

Maslow’s hierarchy, briefly, is the idea that you have to satisfy your more basic needs before higher levels of intellectual fulfillment are possible. You can’t do poetry if you’re worried about what you’re going to eat today.

We can look to the case of Siegfried Sassoon and ponder whether this is the case or not for poetry, but I think it's mostly true in software. You can’t worry about the big picture and ask intelligent questions about the direction of the product if you’re busy arguing about which database or alerting system to use.

I’ve been pretty lucky to have been in situations where those basic needs were fulfilled. And I want to help get others to this state.

An important step in getting to that state is realizing that attention is precious.

Humans have a finite amount of capacity for sweating details.

My friend Andrew wears the same brand of black shirt every day. He thinks that if he conserves the brainpower it would take to pick something to wear, he’ll bank it and be able to use it later for something else.

I don’t know if this makes sense for fashion or what have you, but I really think there is something to this.

I like to think about it like this. Let’s say that we all get a limited number of innovation tokens to spend. This is a purely fictional construct I just made up, and my ICO goes on sale next week.

These represent our limited capacity to do something creative, or weird, or hard. We really don’t have that many of these to allocate. Early on in a company’s life, we get like maybe three. Not too many more than that.

So what’s your company trying to do? Well, Etsy, where I used to work, used to make the claim that it was trying to reshape the entire world economy.

Now I don’t know the extent to which we should take tech company missions seriously. I am beginning to suspect that we should not take them seriously at all.

But let’s be naive...