Boring tech

I just created a SQLite database in my terminal for the first time ever, within five minutes. WITHOUT needing to install any tools. I think I’m not going back to Postgres or any other database ever.

It’s such a breath of fresh air.

TBH I think I have framework fatigue. Or rather, fatigue from merchants of complexity, especially in contexts where complexity is not needed. Truth is, most of the dev tools seems to be built for large tech enterprises, big teams, high volume traffic, high concurrency or very large datasets in the hundreds of terabytes.

My indie hacker projects have very different requirements. Even if one goes viral and gets very successful, earns me $10k or $100k per month, I doubt it will get to those levels of traffic, concurrency or dataset size! And even if I can use them, there’s a lot of future debt and maintenance associated with it, which I find to be a waste of time. I’d rather focus on growing my business than spending time updating dependencies and refactoring code because some bored dev decided to rework his framework from ground up.

That’s why more and more I find that the tools I’m choosing seem to fall into this set of criteria:

• not shiny aka boring
• stable
• update cycle is slow
• backwards compatible
• zero to little breaking changes
• no installation required
• no extra tooling required
• lots of support and resources available
• existing community
• cheap or free, or FOSS
• no frameworks
• not maintained by a big tech company

That’s why I’m looking for a SaaS boilerplate made in HTML, CSS and Javascript.
That’s why I’m increasing using just plain Javascript now.
That’s why my website pages are index.html.
That’s why I’m trying SQLite.

And enjoying them all.

The more boring, the better.