I spent years chasing the shiny new thing. In 2026, I am betting on the most controversial architecture of all: Simplicity.
I used to be a Resume Driven Developer.
You know the type. If a project didn't involve Kubernetes, three different cloud providers, a message queue, and a framework that was released last Tuesday, I wasn't interested.
I wasn't building software; I was building a monument to my own ego.
And the result? My cloud bill was higher than my grocery bill, and I needed a map just to find where my user's password was stored.
It is now 2026. The hype cycle is exhausting.
AI tools generate code faster than we can debug it. Complexity is drowning us.
So, for this year, I am making a radical change. I am betting on the "Boring Stack".
Here is why I am firing complexity, and why you probably should too.
You Are Not Google (And Neither Am I)
We fell for a lie. We looked at Netflix and Uber and thought: "They use Microservices, so I should too for my To-Do app."
But we forgot that they have 2,000 engineers. I have me, a coffee mug, and a deadline.
When you split your application into 10 tiny services, you don't remove complexity. You just move it from your code to your network. And debugging a network error at 2 AM is not my idea of a good time.
This year, I am returning to the Majestic Monolith. One repo. One deploy. One database. If I want to find a bug, I don't need distributed tracing—I just need Ctrl+F.
The Stack I'm Actually Using
While everyone else is arguing about the latest meta-framework, here is what I am shipping production code with:
The Compute: A single VPS. No serverless cold starts. No hidden costs. Just a Linux box that runs forever.
The Database:
SQLite or Postgres. No fancy NoSQL document stores that require me to join data in the application layer. Relational data is beautiful. Let SQL do the work.
The Backend:
A standard REST API. GraphQL is cool, but asking for specific fields isn't my bottleneck. Complexity is.
The Frontend:
React (because I know it) without 50 extra libraries.
Is it scalable?
Stack Overflow runs on a monolith. Shopify runs on a monolith. Unless you are planning to onboard the entire population of Brazil tomorrow, a boring monolith is fine.
Boring Software Makes Money
The biggest realization I had as a Senior Engineer is that users do not care about your tech stack.
They don't care if you are using Rust or Python. They don't care if your architecture is "event-driven." They care if the button works when they click it.
When you choose boring technology, you spend less time configuring Webpack and more time building features. Features get customers. Customers pay bills.
The Joy of "Finished"
There is a specific peace of mind that comes with using tools that are older than the interns on your team.
When I use SQLite, I know it works. It has been tested on billions of devices. It doesn't break because of an npm update. It just sits there, reliably saving my data, asking for nothing in return.
So, in 2026, keep your Kubernetes clusters and your edge-computing-serverless-functions.
I will be over here with my single server and my SQLite file, shipping products while you are still configuring your YAML files.
What is the one "boring" tool you refuse to give up? Let me know in the comments.
Top comments (93)
HTML/CSS/JS I think about sums it up!
The holy trinity. You can't get more foundational than that.
At the end of the day, every complex framework we invent just compiles down to those three things anyway. It is the only stack guaranteed to still work in 2036.
React is not just boring. It's very cumbersome to work with, slow, conceptually broken and heavy.
SQL is not beautiful. It would be if the world could actually fit 2D tables and never changed its shape.
GraphQL is not cool. It's actually very boring. Setting up infrastructure, configuration, resolvers... ah... shall we touch how heavily it can hit the client?
As an intermediate solution, dopamine antagonists can make everything feel boring again, if hype was the only thing in the way of making good choices. 😈
So, not sure "boring" should be the driving requirement as it can introduce bias the same way as just following hype and trends would. Maybe it's not just about being "boring", but there are other factors, as well?
With innovation happening faster and faster in all industries, it's equally important to spot good innovation more effectively and filter out the useless noise.
You bring some necessary nuance to the discussion. You are right that the Titanic analogy breaks down at scale, you cannot run global logistics on a wooden boat.
I also agree that "boring" should not become a dogma. It is intended as a heuristic to filter noise. The burden of proof should be on the new tool to demonstrate why it is better than the proven one, rather than the other way around.
Innovation is vital, but as you said, filtering out the noise is the real challenge.
Using a boring stack on a $30/year VPS is underrated. We don't hear about it enough because it just works and has essentially worked the same way "forever".
A single VPS can handle a lot more traffic than many people would think. I have a site that handles ~700-1000 rps during a few peak times, and one VPS with 4 cores and 4 GB RAM handles it fine (thanks, C#).
700-1000 RPS on a single VPS is the reality check most developers need to hear. We often architect for Google-scale when we have not even reached "One VPS scale" yet.
You make a great point about the silence. Boring tech gets less press coverage precisely because it doesn't break. It just sits there and does the job.
Amen to that...
This resonates hard.
Currently building an EDR in Pure C. No Python. No Node. No dependencies beyond libc.
My "boring" tools I refuse to give up:
C — The binary is 110KB. Deploy with scp. Done.
Make — Not CMake, not Meson. Just Make.
TCP sockets — Raw connect(), send(), recv(). No HTTP framework.
sysctl — Kernel-userspace communication without dbus or grpc.
When something breaks at 2 AM, I grep through one codebase instead of tracing 15 microservices.
The "boring stack" is a superpower in security especially. Fewer deps = smaller attack surface.
This is the "hardcore mode" of the boring stack philosophy, and I respect it immensely.
The point about attack surface is critical. In an era of supply chain attacks, having zero dependencies is a massive security feature, not just a preference. Shipping a 110KB binary in 2026 is a flex.
Thanks! The supply chain point is exactly why we went this route. Every dependency is a trust decision. With pure C and Make, the entire build is auditable in an afternoon.
The 110KB isn't just about size — it's about attack surface. No interpreter, no runtime, no hidden behaviors. When you strace it, you see exactly what it does.
Security tools that require Node or Python to install create a beautiful irony: "install these 500 packages to protect yourself from... supply chain attacks." 😅
Boring tech, bulletproof security. That's the trade-off we'll take every time.
Translation: "Increase your chances of supply chain attacks by elevating your overall exposure and scaling potential attack vectors exponentially...
...ahem, just kidding, please excuse our intern who likes to joke about predatory marketing strategies that our competitors use but our company does not condone!
You definitely said the quiet part out loud there.
There is an entire economy built on selling bandages for self-inflicted architectural wounds. If everyone started shipping single binaries with zero dependencies, a lot of enterprise security vendors would miss their quarterly targets.
There is an entire economy built on selling bandages for self-inflicted architectural wounds. If everyone started shipping single binaries with zero dependencies, a lot of enterprise security vendors would miss their quarterly targets
Running my highly interactive SPA apps on MeteorJs. Boring but it's stable and reliable, deployment is a single command even if you deploy to a custom single root server. Yes it uses MongoDB but it solves many of its problems with client side collections. Reactivity is out of the box and community is awesome people
Meteor was decades ahead of its time. The concept of client-side collections was doing Local-First and Optimistic UI long before those terms became marketing buzzwords.
If you have a stack where deployment is a single command and the database sync just works, you have solved the hardest parts of engineering. Definitely fits the philosophy.
This really resonates. After building and maintaining a few “impressive” systems, I’ve learned that complexity is a tax you keep paying forever. The boring stack isn’t about being lazy—it’s about being intentional. A monolith, a relational DB, and a predictable deploy pipeline let you reason about your system, move fast, and actually sleep at night. Users don’t reward architectural purity; they reward reliability. Shipping something understandable that works > maintaining a distributed science project. Solid reminder for 2026 👌
Complexity is a tax you keep paying forever. That is a perfect way to frame it. It is not a one-time cost; it is compound interest on technical debt.
I also love the phrase "distributed science project." We have all seen codebases that look more like academic experiments than shipping products. Reliability is the only feature that truly matters.
Neat - I like that take on simplicity 💯
For me it also is a big deal being simple (mh perhaps understandable is the better word) in your code base.
That does not mean we are bloating the
Program.cswith 10k LoC but try to be understandable even for the slowest learner in the team.Otherwise the day will come that you have to justify yourself by teaching those co-devs why you chose to create an entire framework beneath that 4-paged Xamarin.Forms-App.
So, just some phrases that come unfiltered into my mind:
jsonforms)I think in the end it is: simple does not mean crap - it is well-educated and chosen. Not by accident.
This is a fantastic list of principles. You hit on the most important distinction at the end: simple does not mean low quality. It means intentional.
I especially like your point about making code "understandable even for the slowest learner." We often write code to impress other seniors, but we should be writing code that is easy for anyone to maintain.
Also, "don't introduce Redux with a crowbar" made me laugh. We have all seen that happen.
Notepad++ ? :D
No but seriously though, "boring" is relative isn't it?
Been working with c# .net for the last 18 yrs, a lot of it feels like boilerplate. But what feels routine to me might look clean, structured, and even exciting to someone new to it. Funny how that works, ya know :)
Notepad++ is legendary.
You raise a great point about relativity. Often, "boring" is just a synonym for "familiarity" or "mastery." When you have worked with C# for 18 years, the patterns are second nature to you.
That is exactly the state I aim for, where the tool becomes invisible because I know it so well.
Well said! I've been trying to explain this to my partners for years already. Functionality over fanciness! Nobody cares! The end user is the most important piece in the business.
It is a tough battle to fight, especially when stakeholders get distracted by the latest industry buzzwords.
"Functionality over fanciness" is a perfect summary. The user has never once inspected the code to see if we used Microservices. They just want their problem solved.
> The biggest realization I had as a Senior Engineer is that users do not care about your tech stack.
Users don't, but employers do. I bet you got at least one of your jobs because an experimental side-project using ShinyNewThing put you at an advantage over the other resumes. Hype-Driven Development is great when the market's hot, or when you can't stand out using experience and results alone.
That is the painful truth. There is often a disconnect between what makes a product successful and what makes a resume stand out.
You are absolutely right that learning the shiny new thing is a valid strategy to get your foot in the door. Once you are hired, the challenge becomes balancing that hype with the stability needed to actually ship.
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