Boring technology that does great things has been a huge part of my career for the past eight years at Precision Nutrition. With that said, the following opinions are mine and mine alone.

Here are some boring choices we made that paid dividends:

1. Postgres. It does what it does, it's stable, it's reliable, and continues to improve as time goes on. 2. Ember. It's by far the most stable front end framework going. It's made our job easy in uncountable numbers of ways. 3. PostCSS. Write plain CSS, use modern features, remove plugins as browser support grows.

A few years ago I'd have said Rails was a boring technology we chose too. These days I'd say it's a bit of a thorn. It's clear that some of the magical choices made make long term maintainability challenging, as are some of the performance characteristics. A few of the libraries used by the community have bitten us hard too insofar that they're either a maintenance nightmare, poorly maintained, or exceptionally difficult to migrate away from (e.g. CanCanCan, Active Model Serializers).

These days I'm playing with Elixir, which is also boring but allows you to do exciting things. I especially appreciate ExUnit having come from the RSpec world — assert, refute, end of story.