Every engagement starts with a stack choice. And every engagement, someone on the team wants to introduce a new language, a new queue, or a new database — usually for good reasons, sometimes for vanity.
Our rule of thumb: boring tech by default, novel tech where it creates real leverage. If your product's core differentiation is not 'fast writes to an exotic database,' you probably don't need the exotic database.
Postgres handles more than people give it credit for. Node and Python cover most API work. Redis is the right cache until it isn't. These aren't exciting answers — they're answers that let you sleep at night two years from now.
The novelty exception exists. Some problems genuinely need a new tool. We pick it deliberately, document the decision, and make sure the next engineer can pick it up without a seminar.
Boring tech isn't lazy. It's a choice to spend creativity on the product, not on ops.
