We have part of a system at work that was written in Java and it is horrible because the team that built it has a bad case of NIH. They ended up implementing a very poorly designed file system based database. Now that part of the system has horrible I/O performance because it is opening, reading, writing literally 10's of millions of files per day. The development team wanted to be clever and innovative on something that should have been a dartboard throw at Oracle, MySQL, MS SQL, or Postgresql.
The analogy to plumbing and electricians is funny because typically those types of contractors are really skeptical of new-fangled products and they usually want to stick with tried and true solutions. But those are industries that have been around for a couple hundred years, right?
The point of the article is to focus on your core product and leave the plumbing alone by picking boring stable stuff. You can build a business with all boring stable stuff too, but that may not attract "rock star" developers.
I am seeing the same crap on a project for the opposite reasons. They want to use NoSQL for the main queries, and are actively avoiding using a relational database. Means they are going to use the filesystem as a database, whereas a relational database on top of it would be a far better system.
The analogy to plumbing and electricians is funny because typically those types of contractors are really skeptical of new-fangled products and they usually want to stick with tried and true solutions. But those are industries that have been around for a couple hundred years, right?
The point of the article is to focus on your core product and leave the plumbing alone by picking boring stable stuff. You can build a business with all boring stable stuff too, but that may not attract "rock star" developers.