Ask HN: Which boring technology do you still use?

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  • bs

  • A wood-fired stove, wood-fired cooking stove, a few different types of axes and a crosscut saw to provide the former with fuel from dead trees.

    Oh, wait? Those are not 'boring technologies', they're just 'old technologies' - nothing boring about them.

    Computer-related 'boring' technologies in daily use: the nix tool set - shell, awk, sed, perl, curl and the like plus some relatively newcomers like jq and xidel to handle web-related things. Vim in one of its guises. Instead of fighting npm and the myriad of ever-changing related tools to provide CLI tools I tend to use the former to open up APIs to those who live on the command line. All the claims of shell being unsuitable for such projects notwithstanding these tools tend to work reliably while being self-contained - a single file pulling in a single config file and sometimes a common functions file. No transpilers needed, no packers, no shitload of libraries, no nuthin' - just a few hundred lines of 'boring' shell like e.g. this BookStack* API CLI [1] I made a week and a bit ago.

    Storage: MDADM and LVM hosting ext4 instead of ZFS because I like the separation of tasks and the greater flexibility over the latter.

    Web: PHP because it works and performs well enough. Java when needed, also because it works and performs well enough. Pure Javascript instead of the jumble of libraries/frameworks/new-ways-of-doing-things because those all too often end up being old-unmaintained-ways-of-doing-things.

    System: C over C++/Rust/Zig over Go/Nim/Crystal because it is the Lingua Franca which has stood the test of time and will probably outlive most of those mentioned languages.

    Communications: SMTP/IMAP + XMPP and when needed Telegram over Slack/Teams/whatever.

    Cloud? Only when I have the hardware under my own control and within reach. The server lives under the stairs, the backup server under some other stairs in another building.

    Wired Ethernet over WiFi when possible.

    Older hardware, usually rescued from a dumpster or something similar.

    [1] https://github.com/Yetangitu/bs

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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