There's a temptation in my line of work to build with whatever's new and exciting, because new and exciting is fun to build and impressive to talk about. I've mostly stopped giving in to it, and the reason is that I'm not the one who has to live with the thing after I leave. You are.
The exciting choice and the durable choice are usually not the same choice. And when they diverge, the person who built it is optimizing for a different outcome than the person who owns it.
The two-year problem
Here's the pattern I've watched play out for twenty years. A business gets a site or a system built on whatever was hot that year — the framework everyone was excited about, the platform that was going to change everything. It works, for a while. Then the excitement moves on. The framework stops being maintained, or the platform pivots, or the one developer who understood it moves on too. And two years later the business is staring at a thing nobody wants to touch, being told the only option is to rebuild from scratch.
They paid twice for one website. That's the real cost of the exciting choice, and the business almost never sees it coming, because it arrives long after the impressive launch everyone celebrated.
“"New" is a feature for the builder. "Still working in five years" is a feature for you.”
Boring is a gift you give the owner
When I choose deliberately unglamorous, well-established technology for a project, I'm not being lazy or behind the times. I'm making a bet on your behalf: that in five years you'll be glad this thing is built on something stable, widely understood, and easy for anyone — including someone who isn't me — to maintain. Boring technology has a quiet superpower. Lots of people know it. It doesn't surprise you. It's still going to be here.
This is also why I won't lock you into a stack only I can service. If the only person who can maintain your site is the person who built it, you don't own a website — you own a dependency. Durable, well-understood tools mean you can hand the thing to anyone and they'll know what they're looking at. That's not a limitation. That's freedom you'll appreciate the first time you need it.
The judgment is the job
None of this means never use anything new. New is sometimes exactly right, and part of what you're paying a senior person for is knowing the difference — when the new thing has earned its place and when it's just shiny. The skill isn't picking old or picking new. It's choosing what fits where you're headed and what will still be standing when you get there.
I'd rather build you something a little less exciting that you never have to think about again than something thrilling that becomes someone else's expensive problem. The unglamorous choice, made on purpose, is one of the most valuable things I bring to a project. You just won't notice it — which is exactly the point.
