I love the way Maciej Cegłowski describes his setup at Pinboard:
"Pinboard is written in PHP and Perl. The site uses MySQL for data storage, Sphinx for search, Beanstalk as a message queue, and a combination of storage appliances and Amazon S3 to store backups. There is absolutely nothing interesting about the Pinboard architecture or implementation; I consider that a feature!"
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.
"Pinboard is written in PHP and Perl. The site uses MySQL for data storage, Sphinx for search, Beanstalk as a message queue, and a combination of storage appliances and Amazon S3 to store backups. There is absolutely nothing interesting about the Pinboard architecture or implementation; I consider that a feature!"
https://pinboard.in/about/