Over the years I had several opportunities to pick tools for different projects and challenges, with varying requirements. Occasionally, I would encounter myself like a cranky old man being uncool and putting some new and amazing tech in vogue to sleep in front of the whole team.
I noticed that we all saw the thrill of something new in a different light on those occasions. While more people were focused on the power of what’s known, I’d be focused on the danger of the unknown unknowns that new and shiny brought.
There’s a (famous?) article by Dan McKinley about the value of choosing boring technology which I strongly encourage anyone to read. Aptly referred to as “how to be old, for young people.”
What does «boring but good» mean today? I pick these three.
Cookie-based sessions
Oh yes, get out of my lawn with tokens and JWT. It’s a great design, and you can do mind-blowing distributed stuff with it at a celestial scale. But it’s not a good pick for a simple SPA and requires a decent amount of work to go through reasonable use cases.
«But it doesn’t scale!» Yes, it does. Bloody Google uses it. Come to need it, you will have alternatives.
«But it’s less secure!» No, it’s not.
And I can bet you are repeating DB queries on each request.
REST APIs
REST APIZ FTW. Plain, fast, clear and simple. What’s not to love WHEN INTEGRATING and implementing that to expose YOUR data. GraphQL was coming to raise ourselves to a heaven crafted by JSON queries that did not materialize.
«But it’s not binary!» Solved in HTTP/3.
«But it’s structured and rigid!» If you are early prototyping, just move that API around. If you are a stable product, that is a feature.
And don’t get me started on trying to reliably solve authorization.
Postgres for everything
I wrote a bit about this in my last post, so I won’t repeat myself. Just pick Postgres and use it normally, you should be good in most cases.
Is that all?
Yes and no. SPAs are something that I believe might join this list since I knew HTMX was a thing. But I haven’t been able to try it for real, so I’ll hold on it.
Salute, ci vediamo.
Juan Saavedra 