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I mean vanilla stuff like MySQL and PHP. In the Old Times both were considered toy projects unworthy of running a production website, while now both have been patched and improved into complete stability.

He has some (funny) info on Pinboard About page (https://pinboard.in/about) regarding 'the technology', perhaps he was mentioning that...

> Pinboard is written in PHP and Perl. The site uses MySQL for data storage, Sphinx for search, Beanstalk as a message queue, and a combination of storage appliances and Amazon S3 to store backups. There is absolutely nothing interesting about the Pinboard architecture or implementation; I consider that a feature!

This is the kind of thing that made it easy for me to justify $39/year (for full page archives). Boring technology isn’t going to excite anyone, but it sure as hell will keep ticking along so long as someone’s at the wheel.

Probably WRT opensource tools (machine learning, databases, frameworks, etc.) that are now 80%[1] as good as what the biggest firms have access to.

1. entirely made-up number

It has been a while since I worked at a big firm, but my experience has always been that open source tools are always far superior.