I also immediately thought of Maciej and Pinboard. He expands a bit in this interview [1]:
> Can you explain why you think that's a feature?
> I believe that relying on very basic and well-understood technologies at the architectural level forces you to save all your cleverness and new ideas for the actual app, where it can make a difference to users.
> I think many developers (myself included) are easily seduced by new technology and are willing to burn a lot of time rigging it together just for the joy of tinkering. So nowadays we see a lot of fairly uninteresting web apps with very technically sweet implementations. In designing Pinboard, I tried to steer clear of this temptation by picking very familiar, vanilla tools wherever possible so I would have no excuse for architectural wank.
"I think many developers (myself included) are easily seduced by new technology and are willing to burn a lot of time rigging it together just for the joy of tinkering."
Part of the problem is the jobs market.
I have been developing database applications for 12 years. Now many of teh jobs that I would seem suitable for want "experience in MongoDb" or "NoSQL skills" (whatever the hell that means - inability to design a schema?). I haven't used those because I have read up on them and decided they were not suitable for any use cases I have. I have used MySQL and Postgres successfully with billions of rows. I know when these new technologies might be useful.
If I need schema-less / JSON stores, I'll use Postgres. If I need things that won't fit onto one server easily then I'll look again at the NoSQL tech that is available and evaluate from there.
> Can you explain why you think that's a feature?
> I believe that relying on very basic and well-understood technologies at the architectural level forces you to save all your cleverness and new ideas for the actual app, where it can make a difference to users.
> I think many developers (myself included) are easily seduced by new technology and are willing to burn a lot of time rigging it together just for the joy of tinkering. So nowadays we see a lot of fairly uninteresting web apps with very technically sweet implementations. In designing Pinboard, I tried to steer clear of this temptation by picking very familiar, vanilla tools wherever possible so I would have no excuse for architectural wank.
[1] http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:98zuG6u...