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Comment by gregors | Hacker News Reader

Talks about boring code, then immediately introduces a completely modern stack that most developers would love to use including grpc, gateways, rds, s3, ec2, testing, separated services & databases, mocking frameworks...

There's nothing boring about this, it's unfortunate that they took to name this "boring code".

Aside from this, the actual implementation details are quite interesting and worth a read. A better title would be "lessons learned using a modern stack for healthcare.gov"

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I think they're saying "boring" in that there were no surprising or unusual choices. Go. Test. Mock. Three Postgres Databases, mostly immutable, partitioned by data patterns / access patterns. Crontabs and shell scripts for data loading. No microservices, no multiple repo's, no strange/innovative technology. Pre-computing a bunch of stuff. 250-line query-builder instead of using GraphQL.

vis: "The Complicators Gloves" https://thedailywtf.com/articles/the_complicator_0x27_s_glov... ... I can imagine co-workers (past and present) who would have tried to add more complexity.

`grpc` is a bit fancy (compared to `curl *.json`), which he admits to, but is also fairly battle-tested / boring, and gets some extra benefit of schema + performance. Maybe swagger or something would have been more "boring", but also veers a little away from "the default golang stack".

(Kind of a side note: grpc-gateway can generate swagger for you, which we did use for building a documentation site. Just thought that was neat)

I think it's boring in the sense that none of it is shiny and new. It's all well-known and battle-tested. I agree that the article is very much worth a read.

I think it's important that to figure out what boring code is, you need to know the context of the organization creating it.

At ad hoc in 2018, using go/react/rds/ec2 was a pretty standard stack that I could be sure my coworkers would have no trouble getting up to speed with.

EC2/S3/RDS is about as boring of a cloud stack as it gets.

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