Maciej Ceglowski on developers spending too much time on the underlying pieces at the expense of polishing the UX and UI:

The Pinboard about page says: “There is absolutely nothing interesting about the Pinboard architecture or implementation; I consider that a feature!”

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.

More thoughts on this from Miguel de Icaza.