There is a famous talk by Dan McKinley called “Choose Boring Technology.” The core argument is simple: every team has a limited budget for novelty. Spend it on your actual product, not your infrastructure.
Innovation Tokens
McKinley introduces the concept of innovation tokens — you get about three. Each new or unfamiliar technology you adopt costs one token. Use them wisely. PostgreSQL might be less exciting than the latest distributed database, but it has decades of battle-testing, excellent documentation, and a massive community.
Boring Does Not Mean Bad
Boring technology is technology that works. It has known failure modes. It has Stack Overflow answers. It has monitoring tools. It has people who have operated it at scale and written about what went wrong.
The most reliable systems I have worked on were built with boring choices. The most painful ones were built with resume-driven development. Choose wisely, and save your innovation tokens for the problems only you can solve.