[rich_archbold]

Hi, Rich, blog author here again.

Your feedback is super fair. That is how it comes across in the blog.

In the talk that came before the blog post, I go into a lot more detail here. I have some slides where I explain that these are "our" standard technologies, and are not intended to be "the" standard technologies that everyone should use.

I gave some other examples of perfectly good sets of "standard" technologies which other companies could choose for lots of good reasons.

The main point that I/we were advocating for was that, in our opinion (just an opinion, not dogma, not definitely right or wrong), there are some strong benefits to making deliberate decisions about what technologies you consider standard, safe, easy and fast to use, versus those that are not.

Some of those benefits we see include: 1. speed of technical decision making 2. incentivizing engineers to develop deep technical expertise in specific technologies 3. incentivizing managers to fund training in specific technologies 4. creating fungibility within your engineering team to make it easier for engineers to transfer between teams and come up to speed quickly 5. minimizing ongoing operational overhead as there's fewer technologies that need to be battle-hardened with operational tooling

[dajonker]

Hi Rich, thanks for the response. I guess I just found it a bit hard to see the lines between "here's a good strategy" and "here's our strategy". Where you are writing "we have a tiered set of recommendations for who to outsource to", you could add something like "for our developers, ..." or "at Intercom, ..." and it would be much better placed into context.

Otherwise I really enjoyed the article, it resonated well with my own thoughts and vision.

[rich_archbold]

thanks again dajonker, that's more good feedback.