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Developers default to the stack they know. That comfort feels productive - until the project grows and the bill arrives. I call this the biased symptom: choosing the familiar tool instead of the right one.
Like many developers, I started in my teens with PHP - when the back end rendered the front end and jQuery sprinkled the UI.
At 22 I joined a small Drupal boutique, then spent three years in Python, four in JavaScript, and now I’m back in Python. Along the way I tried Golang, touched some Java for my never-finished B.Sc., and explored plenty of tools. After enough projects, certain patterns keep repeating.
The biased symptom happens when we choose a technology not because it’s the best fit, but because it’s familiar.
It shows up in startups all the time. Before LLMs you’d reach for Python or Node.js, React or Angular, and start shipping. Today it’s even easier to accept GPT’s first suggestion and roll with whatever stack it spits out.
But as the project grows, reality sets in:
That’s when the biased symptom becomes expensive.
Take Laravel. Many developers dismiss PHP as “old” or “not scalable,” yet Laravel provides:
These save time versus cobbling together equivalents elsewhere. The point isn’t that Laravel is always the answer - it’s that dismissing it without evaluation is the bias in action.
Common assumptions worth challenging:
A client thought they needed a CMS. My first reflex was Drupal - I know it deeply and could have spun it up quickly.
But their internal team was Python-based. Introducing PHP would add complexity and long-term friction.
So I paused and built small MVPs to test alternatives. When I presented options, the team lead said:
“A few months ago, Drupal might have made sense. Today, our technical team will own this project.”
That was the turning point. We pivoted to FastAPI + React. The result was an internal infrastructure project with:
Drupal wasn’t “wrong” in general - just wrong here. Avoiding the biased symptom saved future headaches.
Failure is valuable - if you learn from it. Choosing the right tool, not the familiar one, is how you avoid paying too high a price.