Every new tool you adopt is a promise to maintain it. That promise includes upgrades, security patches, migration guides, and the day its maintainers decide to move on.

Prefer proven defaults

Use the database, framework, and hosting you already know how to operate. Spend your novelty budget on the product, not the plumbing.

Make replacements cheap

Keep boundaries clear and avoid coupling your entire application to one vendor. The goal is not to avoid all dependencies. The goal is to make each dependency easy to replace.

Boring is not the absence of ambition. It is the decision to save your ambition for the work that matters.