Do the simplest thing that could possibly work

https://www.seangoedecke.com/the-simplest-thing-that-could-possibly-work/

by dondraper36 • 11 months ago

1111 385 11 months ago

al_borland3• 11 months ago

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

As someone who has strived for this from early on, the problem the article overlooks is not knowing some of these various technologies everyone is talking about out, because I never felt I needed them. Am I missing something I need, but just ignorant, or is that just needless complexity that a lot of people fall for?

I don’t want to test these things out to learn them in actual projects, as I’d be adding needless complexity to systems for my own selfish ends of learning these things. I worked with someone who did this and it was a nightmare. However, without a real project, I find it’s hard to really learn something well and find the sharp edges.

IAmBroom2• 11 months ago

Yes, and I (nearly) live this nightmare. I have someone higher up in the food chain who is fascinated with every new piece of software they find, that MIGHT be useful. We are often tasked with "looking at it, and seeing if it would be useful".

Yeah, let me shoehorn that fishing trip into my schedule without a charge number, along with the one from last week...

colecut• 11 months ago

Does he ask you to "figure out how to implement AI"?

That is what my boss asks us to do =p

al_borland3• 11 months ago

I was the go-to guy for this under my former boss, but he let me do pretty much whatever I wanted, so it usually wasn’t an issue to not work on anything else while playing around with new stuff.

Though there was a time when he wanted me to onboard my simple little internal website to a big complicated CICD system, just so we could see how it worked and if it would be useful for other stuff. It wouldn’t have been useful for anything else, and I already had a script that would deploy updates to my site that was simple, fast, and reliable. I simply ignored every request to look into that.

Other times I could tell him his idea wouldn’t work, and he would say “ok” and walk away. That was that. This accounted for about 30% of what he came to me with.

threemux• 11 months ago

This is indeed a vexing issue. I feel it often. It's this feeling that leads to resume-driven development which I really work hard to avoid.

dondraper3611• 11 months ago

Such a familiar feeling. Articles similar to this one make lots of sense to and I do try to embrace simplicity and not optimize prematurely, but very often I have no idea whether it's the praised simplicity and pragmatism or just a lack of experience and skills.

SPascareli13• 11 months ago

Implement the simplest thing that works, maybe even by hand at first, instead of adding the tool that does "the whole thing" when you don't need "the whole thing".

Eventually you might start adding more things to it because of needs you haven't anticipated, do it.

If you find yourself building the tool that does "the whole thing" but worse, then now you know that you could actually use the tool that does "the whole thing".

Did you waste time not using the tool right from the start? That's almost a filosofical question, now you know what you need, you had the chance to avoid it if it turned out you didn't, and maybe 9 times out of 10 you will be right.

mrkeen• 11 months ago

Am I missing something I need, but just ignorant, or is that just needless complexity that a lot of people fall for?

Ignorance plays a big role. If you don't perceive, e.g. a race condition happening, then it's much simpler to avoid complicated things like locking and synchronisation.

If you have the belief that your code will never be modified after you commit it, then it's much simpler to not write modifiable code.

If you believe there's no chance of failure, then it's simpler to not catch or think about exceptions.

The simplest thing is global variables, single-letter variable names, string-handling without consideration for escaping, etc.

al_borland3• 11 months ago

For the basics inside a single code base, like error handling, maintainability, race conditions, etc, I’m thinking about most of that.

It’s more about adding additional tools to the stack. I will fight hard not to add in additional layers of complexity that require more infrastructure and maintenance to manage. I want to eliminate as many points of failure as possible, and don’t want the stack to be so complex that other people can’t understand how it all fits together. If I win the lotto, or simply go on vacation, I want whoever has to take it over to be able to understand and support it.

The thing I’ll be working on next week has a lot of potential race conditions, and I need to find a simple solution that avoid them, without creating a support and maintainability burden on myself and the future team. Building a database would probably be the easy solution, but that’s one more dependency and thing to maintain, and also means I need to build a front end for people to access it. If I can do it without a database, that would be ideal.

hinkley7• 11 months ago

One of the biggest, evergreen arguments I’ve had in my career revolves around the definition of “works”.

“Just because it works doesn’t mean it isn’t broken.” Is an aphorism that seems to click for people who are also handy in the physical world but many software developers think doesn’t sound right. Every handyman has at some time used a busted tool to make a repair. They know they should get a new one, and many will make an excuse to do so at the next opportunity (hardware store trip, or sale). Maybe 8 out of ten.

In software it’s probably more like 1 out of ten who will do the equivalent effort.

mandelbrotwurst• 11 months ago

Those conversations are an important part of the job. You can, for example, agree that something works in the sense that it is currently possible to use it to obtain a desired output, while simultaneously failing to work in various ways: It might fail to do so reliably, or it might only be able to do so at great cost.

hinkley7• 11 months ago

It’s a frustrating argument to lose.

On a recent project I fixed our deployment and our hotfix process and it fundamentally changed the scope of epics the team would tackle. Up to that point we were violating the first principle of Continuous: if it’s painful, do it until it isn’t. So we would barely deploy more often than we were contractually (both in the legal and internal cultural sense) obligated to do, and that meant people were very conservative about refactoring code that could lead to regressions, because the turnaround time on a failing feature toggle was a fixed tempo. You could turn a toggle on to analyze the impact but then you had to wait until the next deployment to test your fixes. Excruciating with a high deviation for estimates.

With a hotfix process that actually worked worked, people would make two or three times as many iterations, to the point we had to start coordinating to keep people from tripping over each other. And as a consequence old nasty tech debt was being fixed in every epic instead of once a year. It was a profound change.

And as is often the case, as the author I saw more benefit than most. I scooped a two year two man effort to improve response time by myself in three months, making a raft of small changes instead of a giant architectural shift. About twenty percent of the things I tried got backed out because they didn’t improve speed and didn’t make the code cleaner either. I could do that because the tooling wasn’t broken.

fuzzy2• 11 months ago

From somewhere around the net, I found this quote:

It's not enough for a program to work – it has to work for the right reasons

I guess that’s basically the same statement, from a different angle.

soperj• 11 months ago

I remember once having to make a SOAP call that just wasn't connecting for some reason, but another end point on the same service was working, which made no sense. We tried calling the working endpoint right before calling the busted endpoint just for kicks, and that actually functioned. Still to this day makes no sense at all to me, we ended up moving off of soap eventually, but that code was in there until we did.

IshKebab• 11 months ago

I generally agree, except if the program is a one-time program meant to generate a single output and then you throw it away.

Until recently I would say such programs are extremely rare, but now AI makes this pretty easy. Want to do some complicated project-wide edit? I sometimes get AI to write me a one-off script to do it. I don't even need to read the script, just check the output and throw it away.

But I'm nitpicking, I do agree with it 99% of the time.

vkou• 11 months ago

The definition of 'works' depends on whether my employer wants to spend its resources (the time I'm working) on fixing it.

If they want to use those resources to prioritize quality, I'll prioritize quality. If they don't, and they just want me to hit some metric and tick a box, I'm happy to do that too.

You get what you measure. I'm happy to give my opinion on what they should measure, but I am not the one making that call.

hinkley7• 11 months ago

They’ll never prioritize the work that keeps the wheels on. You have to learn not to ask and bake it into the cost of new feature work. It’s non negotiable or it never happens.

My second lead role, the CTO and the engineering manager thought I could walk on water and so I had considerable leeway to change things I thought needed changing.

So one of the first things I did was collectively save the team about 40 hours of code-build-test time per week. Which is really underselling it because what I actually did was both build a CI pipeline at a time nobody knew what “CI” meant, and increase the number of cycles you could reliably get through without staying late from 4 to 5 cycles per day. A >20% improvement in iterations per day and a net reduction in errors. That was the job where I learned the dangers of pushing code after 3:30pm. Everyone rationalizes that the error they saw was a glitch or someone else’s bug, and they push and then come in to find the early birds are mad at them. So better to finish what we now call deep work early and do lighter stuff once you’re tired.

Edit: those changes also facilitated us scaling the team to over twice the size of any project I’d worked on before or for some time after, though the EM deserves equal credit for that feat.

Then they fired the EM and Peter Principled by far the worst manager I’ve ever worked for (fuck you Mike, everyone hated your guts), and all he wanted to know was why I was getting fewer features implemented. Because I’m making everyone else faster. Speaking of broken, the biggest performance bottleneck in the entire app was his fault. He didn’t follow the advice I gave him back when he was working in our query system. Discovering it took hiring an Oracle DB contractor (those are always exorbitant). Fixing it after it shipped was a giant pain (as to why I didn’t catch his corner cutting, I was tagged in by another lead who was triple booked, and when I tagged back out he unfortunately didn’t follow up sufficiently on the things I prescribed).

Aurornis• 11 months ago

One of the worst periods of my career was at a company that had a team who liked to build prototypes. They would write a hasty proof-of-concept and then their boss would parade it in front of the executives. It would be deployed somewhere and connected to a little database so it technically "worked" when they tried it.

Then the executives would be stunned that it was done so quickly. The prototype team would pass it off to another team and then move on to the next prototype.

The team that took over would open the project and discover that it was really a proof of concept, not a working site. They wouldn't include basic things like security, validation, error messages, or any of the hundred things that a real working product requires before you can put it online.

So the team that now owned it would often have to restart entirely, building it within the structures used by the rest of our products. The executives would be angry because they saw it "work" with their own eyes and thought the deployment team was just complicating things.

hinkley7• 11 months ago

The worst case of this I ran into, the “maintenance” team discovered some of the interactions were demo stubs. Nothing actually happened except the test data looked like the state transition worked.

Those are the worst because you don’t have done criteria you can reasonably write down. It’s whenever QA stops finding fakes in the code, plus a couple months for stragglers you might have missed.

anonymars2• 11 months ago

Thousand-yard stare flashback: "Why is this taking months to make this work? John and James built us the first version in 2 weeks"

will5421• 11 months ago

What would the executives have said if the deployment team had said to them "The product can stay online, but these are the risks of doing so while we work on them."?

Havoc• 11 months ago

“Just because it works doesn’t mean it isn’t broken.”

Meanwhile all the people writing agentic LLM systems: “Hold my beer”

ashwinsundar• 11 months ago

A related concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poka-yoke

hu3• 11 months ago

Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_aren%27t_gonna_need_it

You aren't gonna need it

hiAndrewQuinn• 11 months ago

On the meta level, the simplest thing that could possibly work is usually paying someone else to do it.

Alas, you do not have infinite money. But you can earn money by becoming this person for other people.

The catch 22 is most people aren't going to hire the guy who bills himself as the guy who does the simplest thing that could possibly work. It turns out the complexities actually are often there for good reason. It's much more valuable to pay someone who has the ability to trade simplicity off for other desirable things.

switchbak2• 11 months ago

If I was running a business and I could hire someone that I knew did good work, and did the simplest thing that could possibly work (and it actually worked!) - then I would absolutely do that as soon as possible.

"It turns out the complexities actually are often there for good reason" - if they're necessary, then it gets folded into the "could possibly work" part.

The vast majority of complexities I've seen in my career did not have to be there. But then you run into Chesterton's Fence - if you're going to remove something you think is unnecessary complexity, you better be damn sure you're right.

The real question is how AI tooling is going to change this. Will the AI be smart enough to realize the unnecessary bits, or are you just going to layer increasingly more levels of crap on top? My bet is it's mostly the latter, for quite a long time.

ChefboyOG• 11 months ago

"Will the AI be smart enough to realize the unnecessary bits, or are you just going to layer increasingly more levels of crap on top? My bet is it's mostly the latter, for quite a long time."

Dev cycles will feel no different to anyone working on a legacy product, in that case.

bearjaws• 11 months ago

You know what taught me this the best? Watching Mythbusters.

Time and time again amazingly complex machines and they just fail to perform better than a rubber-band and bubble gum.

lstodd• 11 months ago

eh.. there were series of clips named something like 'Industrial JP' showing the multiaxis (like 6 to 12 axis) spring coil forming machines working

This stuff just can not be reimplemented that simple and be expected to work.

The music was also quite good imo.

oncallthrow• 11 months ago

This just kicks the can down the road. What is "simple"? What does "works" mean?

dondraper3611• 11 months ago

I don't think the author (or anyone else) could come up with term definitions that would satisfy everyone.

dondraper3611• 11 months ago

... and nevertheless at the end of the article, the author does offer their understanding of the terms

underdeserver• 11 months ago

Great advice.

I always felt software is like physics: Given a problem domain, you should use the simplest model of your domain that meets your requirements.

As in physics, your model will be wrong, but it should be useful. The smaller it is (in terms of information), the easier it is to expand if and when you need it.

daxfohl5• 11 months ago

"It’s fun to decouple your service into two pieces so they can be scaled independently (I have seen this happen maybe ten times, and I have seen them actually be usefully scaled independently maybe once)."

Same, or reliability-tiered separately. But in both aspects I more frequently see the resulting system to be more expensive and less reliable.

gonational• 11 months ago

Dealing with this exact scenario, right now. My company has implemented an unnecessarily complex spiderweb of services and the litany of problems that go along with it, in anticipation of some hypothetical, future requirements. Most of the team is fairly new, but they have been led astray by a mid-level engineer who has been masquerading as a top level engineer. By the time I came along, the damage was already done, and the rest of the team is unaware that they have developed about 60 days worth of software, mostly code debt, in more than 18 months.

The situation is extremely frustrating, because I have to be careful not to insult anyone or create endless arguments, while trying to somehow salvage the project into something workable, or convince a team of junior/mid-level engineers to start over (the code is technically not salvageable, at all). Trying to convince people who don't know what they're doing that the same end result could be reproduced in 45 days and then the next 18 months of effort could be condensed into an additional 45 days is like trying to convince an octopus that there are satellites in orbit around the Earth.

bifftastic• 11 months ago

kristianp• 11 months ago

when I asked [KentBeck], "What's the simplest thing that could possibly work?" I wasn't even sure. I wasn't asking, "What do you know would work?" I was asking, "What's possible? What is the simplest thing we could say in code, so that we'll be talking about something that's on the screen, instead of something that's ill-formed in our mind?" I was saying, "Once we get something on the screen, we can look at it. If it needs to be more, we can make it more.

ChrisMarshallNY• 11 months ago

Ockham's Software Architecture...

deepsun• 11 months ago

Don't bother with SSL, it's adds complexity.

Don't add passwords, just "password" is fine. Password policies add complexity.

For services that require passwords just create a shared spreadsheet for everyone.

dondraper3611• 11 months ago

Isn't reading the article before posting comments considered cool anymore?

GMoromisato8• 11 months ago

One of the ironies of this kind of advice is that it's best for people who already have a lot of experience and have the judgement to apply it. For instance, how do you know what the "simplest thing" is? And how can you be sure that it "could possibly work"?

Yesterday I had a problem with my XLSX importer (which I wrote myself--don't ask why). It turned out that I had neglected to handle XML namespaces properly because Excel always exported files with a default namespace.

Then I got a file that added a namespace to all elements and my importer instantly broke.

For example, Excel always outputs <cell ...> whereas this file has <x:cell ...>.

The "simplest thing that could possibly work" was to remove the namespace prefix and just assume that we don't have conflicting names.

But I didn't feel right about doing that. Yes, it probably would have worked fine, but I worried that I was leaving a landmine for future me.

So instead I spent 4 hours re-writing all the parsing code to handle namespaces correctly.

Whether or not you agree with my choice here, my point is that doing "the simplest thing that could possible work" is not that easy. But it does get easier the more experience you have. Of course, by then, you probably don't need this advice.

bvirb2• 11 months ago

We attempt to address this problem at work with an extra caveat to never add code "in the wrong direction" -- so it's fine (usually preferable) to have a partial implementation, as long as it's heading in the direction we'd like the more complete implementation to go in. Basically "KISS, but no hacks".

GMoromisato8• 11 months ago

I really like this as a guideline.

ehansdais• 11 months ago

Just curious, how would that be applied to the xslx namespace problem example given? If the full fix is to implement namespacing, what would the KISS approach be in the right direction?

thinkharderdev2• 11 months ago

Yes, this is an excellent rule. I read an essay years ago (which I can't find now) about technical debt whether the author separate tech debt into two flavors which he analogized to a mortgage (good) and credit card debt (bad). Basically, getting the right design but only partially implementing it is like a mortgage, you're making a down payment on the full implementation and you can pay down the debt over time. But doing terrible hacks to "get something working" is like credit card debt. You're buying some time but will have to pay that back later (with a lot of interest).

nibalizer• 11 months ago

It’s the same for AI vibecoding. The more experience you have, the easier it is to keep the agent on the right path. Same for identifying which tasks to use an agent for vs doing yourself.

taffer• 11 months ago

One of the ironies of this kind of advice is that it's best for people who already have a lot of experience and have the judgement to apply it. For instance, how do you know what the "simplest thing" is?

I think the author kind of mentions this: "Figuring out the simplest solution requires considering many different approaches. In other words, it requires doing engineering."

tuatoru• 11 months ago

I like this. I had a rule of three: figure out three qualitatively different ways to solve the problem - different in kind, not just in choice of tools. Once you have three you start to understand the trade-offs. And you can come up with others quite easily.

GMoromisato8• 11 months ago

Agreed! The author is clearly an experienced and talented software engineer.

But the irony, in my opinion, is that experienced engineers don't need this advice (they are already "doing engineering"), but junior engineers can't use this advice because they don't have the experience to know what the "simplest thing" is.

Still, the advice is useful as a mantra: to remind us of things we already know but, in the heat of the moment, sometimes forget.

anon63622• 11 months ago

Yep. Engineering almost always involves experimenting for suitability of multiple approaches, configurations, and other concerns. Measure, measure, and measure some more while considering nonfunctional requirements/concerns... something no LLM can (yet) do. (I don't hold out hope that there won't soon be some fully-autonomous coding/systems management LLMs that can create a tight Prompt/REPL/Test loop to take requirements and feedback directly from users.)

thefourthchime4• 11 months ago

I think most commentators here are missing the point that doing the "simplest" thing doesn't mean doing the hackiest, quickest thing.

The simplest thing can be very difficult to do. It require thought and understanding the system, which is what he says at the very beginning. But I think most people read the headline and just started spewing personal grievances.

GMoromisato8• 11 months ago

My point is exactly that "the simplest thing can be very difficult to do". You need to be an experienced engineer to apply this advice.

But an experienced engineer already knows this!

I just think it's ironic that this advice is useless to junior engineers but unneeded by senior engineers.

noodletheworld2• 11 months ago

Yes, but this is meaningless advice.

The best solution is the simplest.

The quickest? No the simplest; sometimes thats longer.

So definitely not a complex solution? No, sometimes complexity is required, its the simplest solution possible given your constraints.

Soo… basically, the advice is “pick the right solution”.

Sometimes that will be quick. Sometimes slow. Sometimes complex. Sometimes config, Sometimes distributed.

It depends.

But the correct solution will be the simplest one.

Its just: “solve your problems using good solutions not bad ones”

…and that indeed both good, and totally useless advice.

tetha• 11 months ago

I currently have one concept stuck in my mind, which I would call "Complexity distribution".

For example, at work, the simplest solution across the whole organization was to adopt the most complex PostgreSQL deployment structure and backup solutions.

This sounds counter-intuitive at first. But this way, the company can invest ~3 full time employees on having an HA, PITR capable PostgreSQL clutser with properly archived backups around ~25 other development teams can rely on. This stack solves so many B2B problems of business continuity, security, backups, availability.

And on the other hand, for the dev-teams, the PostgreSQL is suddenly very simple. Inject ~8 variables into a container and you can claim all of these good things for your application without ever thinking about those.

jiggawatts4• 11 months ago

Don't confuse sloppy with simple. Parsing XML with regex[1] (or a non-namespace-compliant XML parser) is not simple. It's messy, verbose, error-prone, and not in any way idiomatic or simple.

If you had just used a compliant XML parser as intended, you might not even have noticed that different encodings of namespaces was even occurring in the files! It just "doesn't register" when you let the parser handle this for you in the same sense that if you parse HTML (or XML) properly, then you won't notice all of the & and < encodings either. Or CDATA. Or Unicode escapes. Or anything else for that matter that you may not even be aware of.

You may be a few more steps away from making an XLSX importer work robustly. Did you read the spec? The container format supports splitting single documents into multiple (internal) files to support incremental saves of huge files. That can trip developers in the worst way, because you test with tiny files, but XLSX-handling custom code tends to be used to bulk import large files, which will occasionally use this splitting. You'll lose huge blocks of data in production, silently! That's not fun (or simple) to troubleshoot.

The fast, happy path is to start with something like System.IO.Packaging [2] which is the built-in .NET libary for the Open Packaging Conventions (OPC) container format, which is the underlying container format of all Office Open XML (OOXML) formats. Use the built-in XML parser, which handles namespaces very well. Then the only annoyance is that OOXML formats have two groups of namespaces that they can use, the Microsoft ones and the Open "standardised" ones.

[1] Famously! https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8577060/why-is-it-such-a...

[2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.io.packa...

GMoromisato8• 11 months ago

Parsing XML is relatively trivial--I'd never use regex, of course, but a basic recursive descent parser can do it pretty easily. I mean, the whole point of XML is that it's supposed to be easy to parse and generate!

Namespaces add a wrinkle, but it wasn't that hard to add. And I was able to add namespace aliasing in my API to handle the two separate "standard" namespaces that you're talking about.

But you're right about OPC/OOXML--those are massive specs and even the tiny slice that I'm handling has been error-prone. I haven't dealt with multiple internal files, so that's a future bug waiting for me. The good news is I'm building a nice library of test files for my regression tests!

daxfohl5• 11 months ago

I gauge it as "the simplest thing to transition". Most of the time, it's easier to transition a single service that doesn't rely on a big number of complex abstractions or extra infrastructure, even if it's at the expense of some clutter or a bit of redundancy. The new owner can step through the code and see what's going on without having to work backward to understand the abstractions or coordination of services or whatever else.

Of course plenty of times there'll be some abstractions that make the code easier to follow, even at the expense of logic locality. And other times where extra infrastructure is really necessary to improve reliability, or when your in-memory counter hack gets more requirements and replacing it with a dedicated rate limiter lets you delete all that complexity. And in those cases, by all means, add the abstractions or infrastructural pieces as needed.

But in all such cases, I try to ask myself, if I need to hand off this project afterward, which approach is going to make things easiest to explain?

Note that my perception of this has changed over time. Long ago, I was very much in the camp of "simple" meaning: make everything as terse as possible, put everything in its own service, never write code when a piece of infrastructure could do it, decouple everything to the maximum extent, make everything config-based. I ironically remember imagining how delighted the new owners would be to receive such a well-factored thing that was almost no code at all; just abstraction upon abstraction upon event upon abstraction that fit together perfectly via some config file. Of course, transition was a complete fail, as they didn't care enough to grok how the all pieces were designed to fit together, and within a month, they'd broken just about every abstraction I'd built into it, and it was a pain for anybody to work with.

Since then, I've kept things simpler, only using abstractions and extra infra where it'd be weird not to, and always thinking what's going to be the easiest thing to transition. And even though I'm not necessarily transitioning a ton of stuff, it's generally easier to ramp up teams or onboard new hires or debug problems when the code just does what it says. And it's nice because when a need for a new abstraction becomes apparent, you don't have to go back and undo the old one first.

b_e_n_t_o_n• 11 months ago

The simplest thing would have been not to rely on something as complex as XLST, but that ship had sailed long ago.

pnt12• 11 months ago

I don't think it's ironic: maybe it's not intuitive / not easy to do!

But there's utility in talking about it. If you teach people that good engineers prepare for Google scale, they will lean towards that. If you teach that unnecessary complexity is painful and slows you down, they will lean towards that.

Maybe we need a Rosetta stone of different simple and complex ways to do common engineering stuff!

ozgrakkurt• 11 months ago

Advice is useless, learning and experience works

me-vs-cat3• 11 months ago

I spent 4 hours re-writing all the parsing code to handle namespaces correctly.

Wouldn't it have been less effort and simpler to replace the custom code with an existing XML parser? It appears that in your case the simplest thing would have been easy, though the aphorism doesn't promise "easy".

If using a library wasn't possible for you due to NIH-related business requirements and given the wide proliferation of XML libraries under a multitude of licenses, then your pain appears to have been organizationally self-inflicted. That's going to be hard to generalize to others in different organizations.

GMoromisato8• 11 months ago

Honestly, four hours spent programming is my idea of heaven.

I totally agree with you that most people should not implement their own XML parser, much less an Excel importer. But I'm grateful to have the luxury of being allowed/able to do both.

The specific choice I made doesn't matter. What matters is the process of deciding trade-offs between one approach and another.

My point is that the OP advice of "do the simplest thing that could possibly work" doesn't help a junior engineer (who doesn't have the experience to evaluate the trade-off) but it's superfluous for a senior engineer (who already has well-developed instincts).

sjducb• 11 months ago

I think the author would say you did the simplest thing that could work.

Ignoring the namespace creates ongoing complexity that you have to be aware of. Your solution now just works and users can use namespaces if they want.

The author deals with this in the hacks section.

ternaryoperator4• 11 months ago

It's a shame he doesn't give the origin of this expression in programming. It comes from Ward Cunningham (inventor of the wiki) in his work with Kent Beck. In an interview a few years back on Dr. Dobb's, he stated that as the two of them were coding together in the late 80s, they would regularly remind each other of the principle. Eventually, it became a staple of their talks and writing.

They were cognizant of the limitations that are touched on in this article. The example they gave was of coming to a closed door. The simplest thing might be to turn the handle. But if the door is locked, then the simplest thing might be to find the key. But if you know the key is lost, the simplest thing might be to break down the door, and so on. Finding the simplest thing is not always simple, as the article states

IIRC, they were aware that this approach would leave a patchwork of technical debt (a term coined by Cunningham), but the priority on getting code working overrode that concern at least in the short term. This article would have done well to at least touch on the technical debt aspect, IMHO.

thefourthchime4• 11 months ago

This should be the top comment.

jdlshore• 11 months ago

Kent Beck went on to formalize Extreme Programming, which is a collection of practices for allowing simple systems to evolve as requirements change.

evanmoran• 11 months ago

Here’s the Extreme Programming manifesto from that time. Very similar sentiment from around two decades ago.

http://www.extremeprogramming.org/rules/simple.html

commandersaki• 11 months ago

Yet its maiden project was an abject failure.

socalgal2• 11 months ago

inventor of the wiki

It's interesting you gave that example. Before my first use of a wiki I was on a team that used Lotus Notes and did project organization in a team folder. I loved that Notes would highlight which documents had been updated since the last time I read them.

In the next project, that team used a wiki. It's simpler. But, the fact it didn't tell me which documents had been updated effectively made it useless. People typed new project designs into the wiki but no one saw them since they couldn't, at a glance, know which of the hundreds of pages had been updated since they last read them.

It was too simple

avhon1• 11 months ago

FWIW, showing recent changes is a very common wiki feature.

Here's the page for my local makerspace's wiki, which runs on mediawiki:

https://bloominglabs.org/Special:RecentChanges?hidebots=1&li...

me-vs-cat3• 11 months ago

The first wiki by Ward Cunningham included a RecentChanges page from the beginning or very nearly so.

It was too simple

That happens when you ignore requirements, either because they were outright discarded or because they were never recognized. "The simplest thing possible" is understood to include: "to meet all requirements."

rsedgwick• 11 months ago

I heard the expression from a colleague who made it his mantra and manifesto, and had no idea who it came from originally! Perhaps the highest honor for an expression's originator is for it to be so ubiquitous that no one knows he said it.

bjclark• 11 months ago

I came here to say this! Ward taught me this when I paired with him every day when we worked together. It’s his, dare I say, mantra when starting a new feature.

csomar• 11 months ago

It's a shame he doesn't give the origin of this expression in programming.

It is possible the OP came to this conclusion without knowing about Ward Cunningham?

rendaw• 11 months ago

This sounds a lot like the apocryphal Einstein quote

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.

And I found a similar quote from Aquinas

If a thing can be done adequately by means of one, it is superfluous to do it by means of several; for we observe that nature does not employ two instruments where one suffices

(Aquinas, [BW], p. 129).

ternaryoperator4• 11 months ago

Not apocryphal. The article is referenced and discussed in this interview with Kent Beck[0]. As you see, the link goes directly to Dr. Dobb's--although the page is down. Search for "Cunningham" and the first hit takes you right to the conversation.

[0] https://blogs.oracle.com/javamagazine/post/interview-with-ke...

manoDev• 11 months ago

The Principle of Least Action as well.

jbs789• 11 months ago

Just to add I think the same applies in business and in life. So if you’ve got managers who have this vision and cascade it down then things become easier on the ground / the design.

dewey2• 11 months ago

It's a shame he doesn't give the origin of this expression in programming.

Sometimes better to not assume the worst of people by default. Very easy to not know where something comes from, misremember or come up with something in parallel.

ternaryoperator4• 11 months ago

I'm not sure what you're referring to. HN is a site where article pro's and con's are discussed. The comment was respectful and I believe informative.

At no time was anything like the "worst of people" anywhere on the radar.

daxfohl5• 11 months ago

I wholeheartedly agree with this. The challenge is perception though. Many managers will see a simple solution to a complex problem and dock you for not doing real engineering, whereas a huge convoluted mess to solve a simple problem (or non-problem) gets you promoted. And in design interviews, "I'd probably implement a counter in memory" would be the last time you ever heard from that company.

JackFr• 11 months ago

Before you write a parser, try a regex. (But some times you really do need a parser.)

dochtman• 11 months ago

I would argue that regexes are often more complex than simple parsers.

dondraper3611• 11 months ago

That's where the familiarity factor steps in.

sfpotter• 11 months ago

Generally speaking, when I hear people say this, it's a huge red flag. Really, any time anyone puts forth any kind of broad proclamation about how software development should be done, my hackles go up. Either they don't know what they're talking about, they're full of shit, or both. The only reasonable thing to conclude after lots of experience with software development is that it's hard and requires care and deliberation. There is no one-size-fits-all advice. What I want to see is people who are open-minded and thoughtful.

switchbak2• 11 months ago

I mean, I think I agree more with this sentiment than most. These overly general statements tend to not have much nuance, and do little to incorporate context.

But also keep in mind the audience: the kinds of people who are tempted to use J2EE (at the time) with event sourcing and Semantic Web, etc.

This is really a counterbalance to that: let's not add sophistication and complexity by default. We really are better off when we bias towards the simpler solutions vs one that's overly complex. It's like what Dan McKinley was talking about with "Choose Boring Technology". And of course that's true (by and large), but many in our industry act like the opposite is the case - that you get rewarded for flexing how novel you can make something.

I've spent much of my career unwinding the bad ideas of overly clever devs. Sometimes that clever dev was me!

So yes ... it's an overly general statement that shouldn't need to be said, and yet it's still useful given the tendency of many to over-engineer and use unnecessarily sophisticated approaches when simpler ones would suffice.

whizzter• 11 months ago

I was initially annoyed at parts of the article, but it does point out that "hacks" often adds hidden complexity that isn't simple so there is a clarity about the tradeoff.

Now the problem with the headline and repeating it is, when "just do a simple thing" becomes mandated from management (technical or not), there comes a certain stress about trying to keep it simple and if you try running with it for a complex problems you easily end up with those hacks that become innate knowledge that's hard to transfer instead of a good design (that seemed complex upfront).

Conversly, I think a lot of "needless complexity" comes from badly planned projects where people being bitten by having to continuously add hacks to handle wild requirements easily end up overdesigning something to catch them, only to end up with no more complexity in that area and then playing catchup with the next area needing ugly hacks (to then try to design that area that stabilized and the cycle repeats).

This is why as developers we do need to inject ourselves into meetings (however boring they are) where things that do land up on our desks are decided.

stephenlf• 11 months ago

It’s Rich Hickey’s “Simple made Easy” all over again. “Simple” is not the easy path. Simple (or simplex, unbraided) describes an end product with very little interleaving of components. Simplicity is elegant. It takes a lot of hard work to achieve a simple end product.

dondraper3611• 11 months ago

I see your point, but, taken to the extreme, all it leaves us with is "everything is a trade-off" or "there's no free lunch".

Some generalizations are necessary to formalize the experience we have accumulated in the industry and teach newcomers.

The obvious problem is that, for some strange reason, lots of concepts and patterns that may be useful when applied carefully become a cult (think clean architecture and clean code), which eventually only makes the industry worse.

For example, clean architecture/ports and adapters/hexagonal/whatever, as I see it, is a very sane and pragmatic idea in general. But somehow, all battles are around how to name folders.

thefourthchime4• 11 months ago

I completely disagree with this being a red flag. It would be a huge green flag for me. The easiest thing to do is to create a complex system, making a simple one is difficult.

alphazard• 11 months ago

Simplicity (meaning the inverse of complexity) is usually the most important factor when considering two possible ways of doing something with software. And this is because it has to be conceived of, pitched to, agreed upon, built, and maintained by humans.

Unfortunately, simplicity is complicated. The median engineer in industry is not a reliable judge of which of two designs is less complex.

Further, "simplicity" as an argument has become something people can parrot. So now it's a knee-jerk fallback when a coworker challenges them about the approach they are taking. They quickly say "This is simpler" in response to a much longer, more sincere, and more correct argument. Ideally the team leader would help suss out what's going on, but increasingly the team lead is a less than competent manager, and simplicity is too complicated a topic for them to give a reliable signal. They prefer not to ruffle feathers and let whoever is doing the work make the call; the team bears the complexity.

melenaboija• 11 months ago

Yes, and when it’s time to implement something by default, you always choose "your optimal". If you have two options that solve the problem equally well, you always choose the simplest, among other things because it’s shorter.

What you really learn over time and it’s more useful, is to think along these lines: don’t try to solve problems that don’t exist yet.

This is a mantraic, cool headline but useless. The article doesn't develop it properly either in my opinion.

johannessjoberg• 11 months ago

“Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.”

― Dijkstra

chairmansteve• 11 months ago

From the article....

"real mastery often involves learning when to do less, not more. The fight between an ambitious novice and an old master is a well-worn cliche in martial arts movies: the novice is a blur of motion, flipping and spinning. The master is mostly still. But somehow the novice’s attacks never seem to quite connect, and the master’s eventual attack is decisive".

adverbly• 11 months ago

I don't think I would go far enough to say that it's generally a red flag...

I see people adding unnecessary complexity to things all the time and advocate for keeping things simple on a daily basis probably. Otherwise designers and product managers and customers and architects will let their mind naturally add complexity to solutions which is unnecessary.

pgwhalen• 11 months ago

Did you read the article? It’s mostly about the nuance of how to apply this philosophy in practice, not a pithy one-size-fits-all statement about all software engineering.

0xbadcafebee4• 11 months ago

Hard, hard disagree.

First of all, simplicity is the hardest thing there is. You have to first make something complex, and then strip away everything that isn't necessary. You won't even know how to do that properly until you've designed the thing multiple times and found all the flaws and things you actually need.

Second, you will often have wildly different contexts.

- Is this thing controlling nuclear reactors? Okay, so safety is paramount. That means it can be complex, even inefficient, as long as it's safe. It doesn't need to be simple. It would be great if it was, but it's not really necessary.

- Is the thing just a script to loop over some input and send an alert for a non-production thing? Then it doesn't really matter how you do it, just get it done and move on to the next thing.

- Is this a product for customers intended to solve a problem for them, and there's multiple competitors in the space, and they're all kind of bad? Okay, so simplicity might actually be a competitive advantage.

Third, "the simplest thing that could possibly work" leaves a lot of money on the table. Want to make a TV show that is "the simplest thing that could possibly work"? Get an iPhone and record 3 people in an empty room saying lines. Publish a new episode every week. That is technically a TV show - but it would probably not get many views. Critics saying that you have "the simplest show" is probably not gonna put money in your pocket.

You want a grand design principle that always applies? Here's one: "Design for what you need in the near future, get it done on time and under budget, and also if you have the time, try to make it work well."

zahlman3• 11 months ago

First of all, simplicity is the hardest thing there is. You have to first make something complex, and then strip away everything that isn't necessary.

I don't follow. I've made simple things many times without having to make a complex thing first.

0xbadcafebee4• 11 months ago

That would make you a genius, so congrats :-) It's more likely that you thought it was simple, but it actually wasn't. Was it actually the least-complex thing that works? Or was it just a thing that worked, and it didn't seem complex? Because those are two different things.

raincole• 11 months ago

Want to make a TV show that is "the simplest thing that could possibly work"? Get an iPhone and record 3 people in an empty room saying lines. Publish a new episode every week.

You just described Podcast. It did work for many (obviously it failed for many as well). That's an excellent example of why one should start with the simplest thing that could possibly work. Probably better than the OP's examples.

0xbadcafebee4• 11 months ago

Podcasts aren't usually scripted episodic content. Some are, but those tend to involve a lot more sound production, and they aren't filmed. If you tried to make filmed scripted episodic content the way you make a podcast, it would be terrible. The exception is improv comedy.

thefourthchime4• 11 months ago

I get what you're saying, but you're also attempting to design the perfect system without any hindsight, which is impossible.

The beauty of this approach is that you don't design anything you don't need. The requirements will change, and the design will change. If you didn't write much in the first place, it's easy.

0xbadcafebee4• 11 months ago

But designing "the simplest thing that could possibly work" may make harder than necessary to modify later. (and any time the requirements change after it's built, you're inching towards a big ball of mud, so this whole idea should be reviled whenever possible)

An example is databases. People design their database schemas in incredibly simplistic ways, and then regret it later when the predictable stuff most people need doesn't work with the old schema, and you can't even just add columns, but you have to modify existing ones. Avoid the nightmare by making it reasonably extensible from the start. It may not be "the simplest thing that could possibly work", but it is often useful and doesn't cost you anything extra.

Just as much as people say "don't prematurely optimize", they should also say "don't prematurely make it total crap".

codingwagie2• 11 months ago

I think this works in simple domains. After working in big tech for a while, I am still shocked by the required complexity. Even the simplest business problem may take a year to solve, and constantly break due to the astounding number of edge cases and scale.

Anyone proclaiming simplicity just hasnt worked at scale. Even rewrites that have a decade old code base to be inspired from, often fail due to the sheer amount of things to consider.

A classic, Chesterton's Fence:

"There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”"

dondraper3611• 11 months ago

The author is a staff engineer at GitHub. I don't think they haven't worked at scale

MangoToupe2• 11 months ago

This could also point to the solution of cutting down the complexity of "big tech". So much of that complexity isn't necessary because it solves problems, it just keeps people employed.

mdaniel3• 11 months ago

This is a horrifically cynical take and I wish it would stop. I doubt very seriously there is any meaningfully sized collection of engineers who introduce things "just to keep themselves employed," to say nothing of having to now advance that perspective into a full blown conspiracy because code review is also a thing

What is far more likely is the proverbial "JS framework problem:" gah, this technology that I read about (or encounter) is too complex, I just want 1/10th that I understand from casually reading about it, so we should replace it with this simple thing. Oh, right, plus this one other thing that solves a problem. Oh, plus this other thing that solves this other problem. Gah, this thing is too complex!

ricardobeat• 11 months ago

At least half the time, the complexity comes from the system itself, echoes of the organizational structure, infrastructure, and not the requirements or problem domain; so this advice will/should be valid more often than not.

codingwagie2• 11 months ago

Right but you cant expect perfect implementation, as the complexity of the business needs grows, so does the accidental complexity.

malux852• 11 months ago

I was one of the original engineers of DFP at Google and we built the systems that send billions of ads to billions of users a day.

The complexity comes from the fact that at scale, the state space of any problem domain is thoroughly (maybe totally) explored very rapidly.

That’s a way bigger problem than system complexity and pretty much any system complexity is usually the result of edge cases that need to be solved, rather than bad architecture, infrastructure or organisational issues - these problems are only significant at smaller, inexperienced companies, by the time you are at post scale (if the company survives that long) then state space exploration in implementation (features, security, non-stop operations) is where the complexity is.

makeitdouble• 11 months ago

the organizational structure, infrastructure

Those are things that matter and can't be brushed away though.

What Conway's law describes is also optimization of the software to match the shape it can be developped and maintained with fewer frictions.

Same for infra, complexity induced by it shouldn't be simplified unless you also simplify/abatract the infra first.

prerok3• 11 months ago

You are not wrong, but the source of the problem may not be the domain but poor software design.

If the software base is full of gotchas and unintended side-effects then the source of the problem is in unclean separation of concerns and tight coupling. Of course, at some point refactoring just becomes an almost insurmountable task, and if the culture of the company does not change more crap will be added before even one of your refactorings land.

Believe me, it's possible to solve complex problems by clean separation of concerns and composability of simple components. It's very hard to do well, though, so lots of programmers don't even try. That's where you need strict ownership of seniors (who must also subscribe to this point of view).

thwarted• 11 months ago

then the source of the problem is in unclean separation of concerns and tight coupling

Sometimes the problem is in the edges—the way the separate concerns interact—not in the nodes. This may arise, for example, where the need for an operation/interaction between components doesn't need to be idempotent because the need for it to be never came up.

motorest5• 11 months ago

If the software base is full of gotchas and unintended side-effects then the source of the problem is in unclean separation of concerns and tight coupling.

Do you know how you get such a system? When you start with a simple system and instead of redesigning it to reflect the complexity you just keep the simple system working while extending it to shoehorn the features it needs to meet the requirements.

We get this all the time, specially when junior developers join a team. Inexperienced developers are the first ones complaining about how things are too complex for what they do. More often than not that just reflects opinionated approached to problem domains they are yet to understand. Because all problems are simple once you ignore all constraints and requirements.

jajko• 11 months ago

I am deep in one such corporate complexity, yet I constantly see an ocean of items that could have been in much simpler and more robust way.

Simple stuff had tons of long term advantages and benefits - its easy to ramp up new folks on it compared to some over-abstracted hypercomplex system because some lead dev wanted to try new shiny stuff for their cvs or out of boredom. Its easy to debug, migrate, evolve and just generally maintain, something pure devs often don't care much for unless they become more senior.

Complex optimizations are for sure required for extreme performance or massive public web but that's not the bulk of global IT work done out there.

daxfohl5• 11 months ago

Though in my previous job, a huge amount of complexity was due to failed, abandoned, or incomplete attempts to refactor/improve systems, and I frequently wondered, if such things had been disallowed, how much simpler the systems we inherited would have been.

This isn't to say you should never try to refactor or improve things, but make sure that it's going to work for 100% of your use cases, that you're budgeted to finish what you start, and that it can be done iteratively with the result of each step being an improvement on the previous.

rednafi2• 11 months ago

Every refactor attempt starts with the intention of 100% coverage.

No one can predict how efficacious that attempt will be from the get-go. Eventually, often people find out that their assumptions were too naive or they don’t have enough budget to push it to completion.

Successful refactoring attempts start small and don’t try to change the universe in a single pass.

fijiaarone5• 11 months ago

The problem isn’t refactoring, its that it was failed, abandoned, or incomplete.

And that’s usually because the person or small group that began the refactor weren’t given the time and resources to do the refactor, and uninterested or unknowledgable people hijacked and over complicated the process, and others blocked it from happening, so what would have taken a few weeks for the initial team to have completed the refactor successfully, with a little help and cooperation from others, and had they not been pulled in 10 different ways to fight other fires — instead after months and months and expending tons of time and money on people mucking it up instead of fixing it, the refactor got abandoned, a million dollars was wasted, and the system as a whole was worse than it was before.

patmcc• 11 months ago

The problem with this is no one can agree about what "at scale" means.

Like yes, everyone knows that if you want to index the whole internet and have tens of thousands of searches a second there are unique challenges and you need some crazy complexity. But if you have a system that has 10 transactions a second...you probably don't. The simple thing will probably work just fine. And the vast majority of systems will never get that busy.

Computers are fast now! One powerful server (with a second powerful server, just in case) can do a lot.

rednafi2• 11 months ago

Yep, vertical scaling goes a long way. But it’s not compute where the bottleneck for scale lies, rather in the resiliency & availability.

So although a single server goes a long way, to hit that sweet 99.999 SLA, people horizontally scales way before hitting the maximum compute capacity of a singe machine. HA makes everything way more difficult to operate and reason about.

hansvm• 11 months ago

Yeah, we do 100k ML inferences per second. It's not a single server, but the architecture isn't much more complicated than that.

With today's computers, indexing the entire internet and serving 100k QPS also isn't really that demanding architecturally. The vast majority of current implementation complexity exists for reasons other than necessity.

mikeryan• 11 months ago

I had an engineering boss who used this as a mantra (he is now an SVP of engineering at Spotify and we worked together at Comcast)

I think the unspoken part here is “let’s start with…”

It doesn’t mean you won’t have to “do all the things” so much as let’s start with too little so we don’t waste time doing things we end up not needing.

Once you aggregate all the simple things you may end up with a complex behemoth but hopefully you didn’t spend too much time on fruitless paths getting there.

breadwinner• 11 months ago

The point is to not overengineer. This is not about ignoring scale, or not considering edge cases. Don't engineer for scale that you don't even know is necessary if that complicates the code. Do the simplest thing that meets the current requirements, but write the code in such a way that more features, scale etc. can be added without disrupting dependencies.

See also: Google engineering practices: https://google.github.io/eng-practices/review/reviewer/looki...

And also: https://goomics.net/316

mhitza• 11 months ago

Anyone proclaiming simplicity just hasnt worked at scale.

Most projects don't operate at scale. And before "at scale", simple, rewritable code will always evolve better, because it's less dense, and less spread out.

There is indeed a balance between the simplest code, and the gradual abstractions needed to maintain code.

I worked with startups, small and medium sized businesses, and with a larger US airline. Engineering complexity is through the roof, when it doesn't have to be. Not on any of the projects I've seen and worked on.

Now if you're an engineer in some mega corp, things could be very different, but you're talking about the 1% there. If not less.

sodapopcan2• 11 months ago

This is the classic misunderstanding where software engineers can't seem to communicate well with each other.

We can even just look at the title here: Do the simplest thing POSSIBLE.

You can't escape complexity when a problem is complex. You could certainly still complicate it even more than necessary, though. Nowhere in this article is it saying you can avoid complexity altogether, but that many of us tend to over-complicate problems for no good reason.

lll-o-lll2• 11 months ago

We can even just look at the title here: Do the simplest thing POSSIBLE.

I think the nuance here is that “the simplest thing possible” is not always the “best solution”. As an example, it is possible to solve very many business or operational problems with a simple service sitting in front of a database. At scale, you can continue to operate, but the amount of man-hours going into keeping the lights on can grow exponentially. Is the simplest thing possible still the DB?

Complexity is more than just the code or the infrastructure; it needs to run the entire gamut of the solution. That includes looking at the incidental complexity that goes into scaling, operating, maintaining, and migrating (if a temporary ‘too simple but fast to get going’ stack was chosen).

Measure twice, cut once. Understand what you are trying to build, and work out a way to get there in stages that provide business value at each step. Easier said than done.

Edit: Replies seem to be getting hung up over the “DB” reference. This is meant to be a hypothetical where the reader infers a scenario of a technology that “can solve all problems, but is not necessarily the best solution”. Substitute for “writing files to the file system” if you prefer.

hammock2• 11 months ago

Yes. I like to distinguish between “complex” (by nature) and “complicated” (by design)

motorest5• 11 months ago

We can even just look at the title here: Do the simplest thing POSSIBLE.

I think you're focusing on weasel words to avoid addressing the actual problem raided by OP, which is the elephant in the room.

Your limited understanding of the problem domain doesn't mean the problem has a simple or even simpler solution. It just means you failed to understand the needs and tradeoffs that led to complexity. Unwittingly, this misunderstanding originates even more complexity.

Listen, there are many types of complexity. Among which there is complexity intrinsic to the problem domain, but there is also accidental complexity that's needlessly created by tradeoffs and failures in analysis and even execution.

If you replace an existing solution with a solution which you believe is simpler, odds are you will have to scramble to address the impacts of all tradeoffs and oversights in your analysis. Addressing those represents complexity as well, complexity created by your solution.

Imagine a web service that has autoscaling rules based on request rates and computational limits. You might look at request patterns and say that this is far too complex, you can just manually scale the system with enough room to handle your average load, and when required you can just click a button and rescale it to meet demand. Awesome work, you simplified your system. Except your system, like all web services, experiences seasonal request patterns. Now you have schedules and meetings and even incidents that wake up your team in the middle of the night. Your pager fires because a feature was released and you didn't quite scaled the service ro accommodate for the new peak load. So now your simple system requires a fair degree of hand holding to work with any semblance of reliability. Is this not a form of complexity as well? Yes, yes it is. You didn't eliminated complexity, it is only shifted to another place. You saw complexity in autoscaling rules and believed you eliminated that complexity by replacing it with manual scaling, but you only ended up shifting that complexity somewhere else. Why? Because it's intrinsic to the problem domain, and requiring more manual work to tackle that complexity introduces more accidental complexity than what is required to address the issue.

imgabe• 11 months ago

A complex system that works is always found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.

You can keep on doing the simplest thing possible and arrive at something very complex, but the key is that each step should be simple. Then you are solving a real problem that you are currently experiencing, not introducing unnecessary complexity to solve a hypothetical problem you imagine you might experience.

jbreckmckye• 11 months ago

I think you're accidentally conducting a motte and bailey fallacy here.

It's making an ambitious risky claim (make things simpler than you think they need to be) then retreating on pushback to a much safer claim (the all-encompassing "simplest thing possible")

The statement ultimately becomes meaningless because any interrogation can get waved away with "well I didn't mean as simple as that."

But nobody ever thinks their solution is more complex than necessary. The hard part is deciding what is necessary, not whether we should be complex.

MetaWhirledPeas• 11 months ago

Exactly.

And to address something the GP said:

I am still shocked by the required complexity

Some of this complexity becomes required through earlier bad decisions, where the simplest thing that could possibly work wasn't chosen. Simplicity up front can reduce complexity down the line.

sgjohnson• 11 months ago

The title is not “Do the simplest thing POSSIBLE”. It’s do the “Simplest thing that could POSSIBLY work”.

There’s a HUGE difference between the simplest thing possible, and the simplest thing that could possibly work.

The simplest thing that could possibly work conveniently lets you forget about the scale. The simplest thing possible does not.

rufus_foreman• 11 months ago

> Even rewrites that have a decade old code base to be inspired from, often fail due to the sheer amount of things to consider

A rewrite of a decade old code base is not the simplest thing that could possibly work.

analog31• 11 months ago

If it's a legacy system, then it lives at the edges. The edges are everything.

I wish I could remember or find the proof, but in a multi-dimensional space, as the number of dimensions rise, the highest probability is for points to be located near the edges of the system -- with the limit being that they can be treated as if they all live at the edges. This is true for real systems too -- the users have found all of the limits but avoid working past them.

The system that optimally accommodates all of the edges at once is the old system.

CuriouslyC• 11 months ago

You don't need a complicated proof, just assume a distribution in some very high number of dimensions, with samples from that distribution having randomly generated values from the distribution for each dimension. If you have if you have ~300 dimensions then statistically at least one dimension will be ~3SD from the mean, i.e. "on the edge," and as long as any one dimension is close to an edge, we define a point as being "near the edge."

It's not really meaningful though, at high dimensions you want to consider centrality metrics.

javier2• 11 months ago

First of all, I dont disagree. Just wanted to add that "the simple thing" is often not the obvious thing to do, and only becomes apparent after working on it for a while. Often times, when you dive into a set of adjacent functionality, you discover that it barely even works, and does not actually do nearly all the things you thought it did.

hammock2• 11 months ago

Yes. The simple thing is not necessarily the obvious thing or the most immediately salient thing. First explore the problem-solution space thoroughly, THEN choose the simple thing

bdangubic• 11 months ago

every complex domain and “at scale” is just a bunch of simple things in disguise… our industry is just terrible in general about breaking things down. we sort of know this so we came up with shit things like “microservices” but you spend sufficient time in the industry (almost three decades for me) and you won’t find a single place that has microservices architecture than you haven’t wished was a monolith :) we are just terrible at this… there is no complex domain, it is just a good excuse we use to justify things

zhouzhao• 11 months ago

Oh boy, this is the best example of "I have been doing it the same way for 30 years" I have ever seen in the world wild web

isaacremuant• 11 months ago

Even the simplest business problem may take a year to solve, and constantly break due to the astounding number of edge cases and scale.

You're doing it wrong. More likely than not.

Anyone proclaiming simplicity just hasnt worked at scale. Even rewrites that have a decade old code base to be inspired from, often fail due to the sheer amount of things to consider.

Or, you're just used to excusing complexity because your environment rewards complexity and "big things".

Simple is not necessarily easy. Actually simple can be way harder to think of and push for, because people are so used to complexity.

Yes. Massive scale and operations may make things harder but seeking simplicity is still the right choice and "working in big tech" is not a particular hard or rare credential in HN. Try an actual argument instead of an appeal to self authority.

mattmcknight• 11 months ago

This is where John Gall's Systemantics comes into play, “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system."

Obviously a bit hyperbolic, but matches my experience.

thinkharderdev2• 11 months ago

I agree with the saying as such but I think it's actually a counterpoint to the "do the simplest thing that could possibly work" idea. When building a system initially you want to do the simplest thing that can possible work, given some appropriate definition of "working". Ideally as the systems requirements evolve you should refactor to address the complexity by adding abstractions, making things horizontally scalable, etc. But for any given change the "simplest thing that can possible work" is usually something along the lines of "we'll just add another if-statement" or "we'll just add another parameter to the API call". Before you know it you have an incomprehensible API with 250 parameters which interact in complex ways and a rats nest of spaghetti code serving it.

I prefer the way Einstein said it (or at least I've heard it attributed to him, not sure if he actually said it): "Make things as simple as possible, but no simpler".

jimbokun• 11 months ago

When the domain is complex, it's even MORE important that the individual components be simple with clean interfaces between them. If everything is too intertwined, you lose the ability to make changes or add new functionality without accidentally breaking something else.

As for Chesterton's Fence, you have the causality backwards. You should not build a fence or gate before you have a need for it. However, when you encounter an existing fence or gate, assume there must have been a very good reason for building it in the first place.

ehnto• 11 months ago

Even rewrites that have a decade old code base to be inspired from, often fail due to the sheer amount of things to consider.

The amount of knowledge required to first generate the codebase, that is now missing for the rewrite, is the elephant in the room for rewrites. That's a decade of decision making, business rules changing, knowledge leaving when people depart etc.

Much like your example, if you think all the information is in the codebase then you should go away and start talking to the business stakeholders until you understand the scope of what you don't currently know.

monkeyelite2• 11 months ago

I have worked at scale - I have found countless examples of people not believing in simple solutions which eventually prevail and replace the big-complex thing.

Complexity is a learned engineering approach - it takes practice to learn to do it another way. So if all you see is complex solutions how would you learn otherwise?

motorest5• 11 months ago

I have worked at scale - I have found countless examples of people not believing in simple solutions which eventually prevail and replace the big-complex thing.

I have worked at scale. I have found examples where simple solutions prevail due to inertia and inability or unwillingness to acknowledge the simple solutions failed to adequately address the requirements. The accidental complexity created by those simple solutions is downplayed as it would require reevaluating the simple solution, and thus run books and operations and maintenances are required as part of your daily operations because that's how the system is. And changing it would be too costly.

Let's not fool ourselves.

naasking• 11 months ago

Even the simplest business problem may take a year to solve, and constantly break due to the astounding number of edge cases and scale.

Is this really because the single problem is inherently difficult, or because you're trying to solve more than one problem (scope creep) due a fear of losing revenue? I think a lot of complexity stems from trying to group disparate problems as if they can have a single solution. If you're willing to live with a smaller customer base, then simple solutions are everywhere.

If you want simple solutions and a large customer base, that probably requires R&D.

3036e4• 11 months ago

Much of this begins with the customers. If they were better at identifying their real needs and specify the most simple possible tools they need, we would not have to deliver bizarrely complex does-everything bloated monster solutions and they could have much more stable, and cheaper, software.

Of course marketing and sales working hard to convince customers that they need more of everything, all the time, doesn't help.

PaulRobinson• 11 months ago

I remember reviewing some code of an engineer I was managing at a FAANG. Noticed an edge case. Pointed out I thought if/when that hit, it was going to cause an alarm that would page on-call. He suggested it might be OK to ship because it was "about a one in a million chance of being hit". The service involved did 500,000 TPS. "So, just 30 times a minute, then?"

And you're right about the amount of engineering that goes into solving problems. One service adjacent to my patch was more than a decade old. Was on a low TPS but critical path for a key business problem. Had not been touched in years. Hadn't caused a single page in that decade, just trudged along, really solidly well engineered service. Somebody suggested we re-write it in a modern architecture and language (it was a kind of mini-monolith in a now unfashionable language). Engineering managers and principals all vetoed that, thank goodness - would have been 5+ years of pain for zero upside.

zaphirplane• 11 months ago

Accidental complexity is a thing, YAGNI is a thing, tech debt caused complexity is a thing, I’m a foo programmer let me write bar code like it’s foo is a thing. I don’t know if its all high quality needed

flohofwoe• 11 months ago

The key is 'required complexity'.

This is different from adding pointless complexity that doesn't help solve the problem but exists only because it is established 'best practice' or 'because Google does it that way' and I've seen this many more times than complex software where the complexity is actually required. And such needlessly complex software is also usually a source of countless day-to-day problems (if it makes its way out the door in the first place) while the 'simplistic' counterpart usually just hums along in the background without anybody noticing - and if there's a problem it's easy to fix because the codebase is simple and easy to understand by anybody looking into the problem. Of course after 20 years of such changes, the originally simple code base may also grow into a messy hairball, but at least it's still doing its thing.

fuzzfactor• 11 months ago

Yes, I would say do the simplest thing and it could possibly work.

If it doesn't, go from there whether you need to find an alternative or add another layer of complexity.

I think when complexity does build, it can snowball when a crew comes along and finds more than could be addressed in a year or two. People have to be realistic that there's more than one way to address it. For one it could be a project to identify and curtail existing excess complexity, another approach is to reduce the rate of additional complexity, maybe take it to the next level and completely inhibit any further excess, or any additional complexity of any kind at all. Ideally all of the above.

Things are so seldom ideal, and these are professionals ;)

No matter what, the most pressing requirement is to earnestly begin mastering the existing complexity to a pretty good extent before it could possibly be addressed by a neophyte. That's addressing it right there. Bull's-eye in fact.

Once a good amount of familiarity is established this could take months to a year(s) in such a situation. By this point a fairly accurate awareness of the actual degree of complexity/debt can be determined, but you can't be doing nothing this whole time. So you have naturally added at least some debt most likely, hopefully not a lot but now you've got a better handle on how it compares to what is already there. If you're really sharp the only complexity you may add is not excess at all but completely essential and you make sure of it.

Now if you keep carrying on you may find you have added some complexity that may be excess yourself, and by this time you may be in a situation where that excess is "insignificant" compared to what is already there, or even compared to what one misguided colleague or team might be routinely erecting on their own. You may even conclude that the only possible eventual outcome is to topple completely.

What you do about it is your own decision as much as it can be, and that's most often the way it is bound to always increase in most organizations, and never come down. So that's the most common way it's been addressed so far, as can be seen.

jlg23• 11 months ago

Even the simplest business problem may take a year to solve, and constantly break due to the astounding number of edge cases and scale.

edge case (n): Requirement discovered after the requirements gathering phase.

mytailorisrich• 11 months ago

Sometimes, often even, complexity and edge cases are symptoms that the problem is not fully understood and that the solution is not optimal.

afro88• 11 months ago

I think this works in simple domains

You're not wrong. So many engineers operating in simple domains, on MVPs that don't have scale yet, on internal tools even. They introduce so much complexity thinking they're making smart moves.

Product people can be similar, in their own way. Spending lots of time making onboarding perfect when the feature could do less, cater for 95% of use cases, and need no onboarding at all.

vasco• 11 months ago

Consider this, everyone at whichever skill level they're at, benefits from applying simplicity to their designs. Also, everyone at any skill level will have a tendency to think the work they are doing is actually deep enough to require the complexity when it reaches the border of their intelligence.

I dont know if you only have genius friends but I can tell you many stories of things people thought warranted complexity that I thought didn't. So whatever you consider hard enough to warrant complexity, just know there's another smarter guy than you thinking you're spinning your wheels.

Also it's an impossible conversation to have without specific examples. Anyone can come and make a handwavy case about always simplifying and someone can make a case about necessary complexity but without specific example none can be proven wrong.

xelxebar• 11 months ago

I think this works in simple domains.

Business incentives are aligned around incremental delivery, not around efficient encoding of the target domain. The latter generally requires deep architectural iteration, meaning multiple complete system overhauls and/or rewrites, which by now are even vilified as a trope.

Mostly, though, I think there is just availability bias here. The simple, solid systems operating at scale and handled by a 3-person team are hard to notice over the noise that naturally arises from a 1,000-person suborganization churning on the same problem. Naturally, more devs will only experience the latter, and due to network effects, funding is also easier to come by.

mpweiher2• 11 months ago

Yet, many times a lot of that scale and complexity is accidental.

Case in point: when I joined the BBC I was tasked with "fixing" the sports statistics platform. The existing system consisted of several dozen distinct programs instantiated into well over a hundred processes and running on around a dozen machines.

I DTSSTCPW / YAGNIed the heck out of that thing and the result was a single JAR running on a single machine that ran around 100-1000 times faster and was more than 100 times more reliable. Also about an order of magnitude less code while having more features and being easier to maintain expand.

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4614-9299-3_...

And yeah, I was also extremely wary of tearing that thing down, because I couldn't actually understand the existing system. Nobody could. Took me over half a year to overcome that hesitancy.

Eschew Clever Rules -- Joe Condon, Bell Labs (via "Bumper Sticker Computer Science", in Programming Pearls)

https://tildesites.bowdoin.edu/~ltoma/teaching/cs340/spring0...

tim3333• 11 months ago

A very complex domain is medical records. The UK has managed to blow billions on custom systems that didn't work. The simplest thing that could have worked was maybe just to download an open source version of VistA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VistA). Probably would have worked better.

aeonik• 11 months ago

Simple does not mean easy.

This is still one of my favorite software presentations.

https://youtu.be/SxdOUGdseq4?si=OqfLAilgB2ERk_8H

jaynate• 11 months ago

Wow, Chesterton’s fence parable could apply in so many places (not the least of which, politics).

greymalik• 11 months ago

Anyone proclaiming simplicity just hasnt worked at scale.

The author of the article is a staff engineer at GitHub.

anymouse123456• 11 months ago

Okay, I'll bite.

Anyone proclaiming simplicity just hasnt [sic] worked at scale

I've worked in startups and large tech organizations over decades and indeed, there are definitely some problems in those places that are hard.

That said, in my opinion, the majority of technical solutions were over engineered and mostly waste.

Much simpler, more reliable, more efficient solutions were available, but inappropriately dismissed.

My team was able to demonstrate this by producing a much simpler system, deploying it and delivering it to many millions of people, every day.

Chesterton's fence is great in some contexts, especially politics, but the vast majority of software is so poorly made, it rarely applies IMO.

whstl• 11 months ago

Hard agree.

I also worked on some quite large organizations with quite large services that would easily take 10x to 50x the amount of time to ship if they were a smaller org.

Most of the time people were mistaking complexity caused by bad decisions (tech or otherwise) with "domain complexity" and "edge cases" and refusing to acknowledge that things are now harder because of those decisions. Just changing the point of view makes it simple again, but then you run into internal politics.

With microservices especially, the irony was that it was mostly the decisions justified as being done to "save time in the future" that ended up generating the most amount of future work, and in a few cases even problems around compliance and data sovereignty.

gozzoo• 11 months ago

So, case by case then?

ozim• 11 months ago

Problem is that you can’t create a system in vacuum.

Mostly it is not like a movie where you hand pick the team for the job.

Usually you have to play the cards you’re dealt with so you take whatever your team is comfortable building.

Which in the end is dealing with emotions, people ambition, wishes.

I have seen stuff gold plated just because one vocal person was making fuss. I have seen good ideas blocked just because someone wanted to feel important. I have seen teams who wanted to „do proper engineering” but they thought over engineering was proper way and anything less than gold plating makes them look like amateurs.

pickdig• 11 months ago

staying kinda anonymous saying this... oftentimes for most programmers the road is a pretty simple one yet the fence or gate is a tolling station of some private interest, so yeah if possible just quit arguing and try to destroy it.

bryanrasmussen• 11 months ago

Anyone proclaiming simplicity just hasnt worked at scale.

or they haven't worked in fields that are heavily regulated, or internationally.

This is why the DOGE guys were all like hey there are a bunch of people over 100 years old getting social security!! WTF!? Where someone with a wider range of experience would think, hmm, I bet there is some reason we need to figure out why they just jumped right to "this must be fraud!!"

bytefish• 11 months ago

For a lot of problems it’s a good idea to talk to customers and stakeholders, and make the complexity very transparent.

Maybe some of the edge cases only apply to 2% of the customers? Could these customers move to a standard process? And what’s the cost of implementing, testing, integrating and maintaining these customer-specific solutions?

This has actually been the best solution for me to reduce complexity in my software, by talking to customers and business analysts… and making the complexity very transparent by assigning figures to it.

kloop• 11 months ago

You're not wrong, but I'm also constantly surprised at places where devs will inject complexity.

A former project that had a codec system for serializing objects that involved scala implicits comes to mind. It involved a significant amount of internal machinery, just to avoid writing 5 toString methods. And made it so that changing imports could break significant parts of the project in crazy ways.

It's possible nobody at the beginning of the project knew they would only have 5 of these objects (if they had 5 at the beginning, how many would they have later?), but I think that comes back to the article's point. There are often significantly simpler solutions that have fewer layers of indirection, and will work better. You shouldn't reach for complexity until you need it.

trey-jones• 11 months ago

The classic comeback - every time I mention simplicity to a particular team member of mine, this is what he says. Complexity is unavoidable. Yes. But if you don't fight it tooth and nail, spend more time than you want trying to simplify the solution, getting second opinions (more minds on difficult problems are better!), then you will increase complexity more than you needed to. This is just a different form a technical debt: you will pay the price in maintenance later.

Maksadbek• 11 months ago

Exactly! If you don't try to keep it simple, especially in bigtech, things get way too complex. I think choosing simplest solution in bigtech is in orders of magnitude more important than in a simple domains.

etse• 11 months ago

There is a lot of sentiment in these comments about needing to scale still. I wonder how many need to do this in a pre-PMF stage vs growth stage? The trade off is faster growth if your PMF bet wins and loss of time if your bet goes south.

damnever• 10 months ago

Those who’ve worked at scale know simplicity is brutally hard — but those who stop pushing for it altogether have failed their responsibility.

jumploops• 11 months ago

As someone who has built 0-1 systems at multiple startups (Seed to Series C), I’ve settled on one principle above all else:

“Simple is robust”

It’s easy to over-design a system up front, and even easier to over-design improvements to said system.

Customer requirements are continually evolving, and you can never really predict what the future requirements will be (even if it feels like you can).

Breaking down the principle, it’s not just that a simple system is less error prone, it’s just as important that a simple architecture is easier to change in the future.

Should you plan for X, Y, and Z?

Yes, but counterintuitively, by keeping doors open for future and building “the simplest thing that could possibly work.”

Complexity adds constraints, these limitations make the stack more brittle over time, even when planned with the best intentions.

mindcrime• 11 months ago

IMO, the most important thing about this sort of advice (and maybe most advice) is to treat it as a "generally useful heuristic, subject to refinement based on judgment" and not as an "ironclad, immutable law of the kingdom, any transgression from which, will be severely punished".

Sure, try to keep things simple. Unless it doesn't make sense. Then make them less simple. Will you get it wrong sometimes? Yes. Does it matter? Not really. You'll be wrong sometimes no matter what you do, unless you are, in fact, the Flying Spaghetti Monster. You're not, so just accept some failures from time to time and - most importantly - reflect on them, try to learn from them, and expect to be better next time.

dondraper3611• 11 months ago

Until you get enough experience for your own good judgment, you need some rules of thumb and guidelines from more experienced peers.

As long as you understand that everything is a trade-off and, unfortunately, that the modern field is based on subjective opinions of popular and not necessarily competent people, you will be fine.

bvirb2• 11 months ago

Very much agree for the type of software I've worked on my whole career. I've seen way more time and energy wasted by people trying to predict the future than fixing bugs. In practice I think it's common to realize something didn't "possibly work" until after it's already deployed, but keeping things simple makes it easy to fix. So this advice also ends up basically being "move fast break things".

spectraldrift2• 11 months ago

I agree with the spirit of the article, but I think the definition of "simple" has been inverted by modern cloud infrastructure. The examples create a false choice between a "simple but unscalable" system and a "complex but scalable" one. That is rarely the trade-off today.

The in-memory rate-limiting example is a perfect case study. An in-memory solution is only simple for a single server. The moment you scale to two, the logic breaks and your effective rate limit becomes N × limit. You've accidentally created a distributed state problem, which is a much harder issue to solve. That isn't simple.

Compare that to using a managed service like DynamoDB or ElastiCache. It provides a single source of truth that works correctly for one node or a thousand. By the author's own definition that "simple systems are stable" and require less ongoing work, the managed service is the fundamentally simpler choice. It eliminates problems like data loss on restart and the need to reason about distributed state.

Perhaps the definition of "the simplest thing" has just evolved. In 2025, it's often not about avoiding external dependencies. You will often save time by leveraging battle-tested managed services that handle complexity and scale on your behalf.

dasil003• 11 months ago

I don't think this is particular to cloud infrastructure. Even on a single server you could make the same argument about using flat file vs sqlite vs postgres for storage. Yes, there is a lot of powerful and reusable software, both managed and unmanaged, with good abstractions and great power to weight ratios where you pay a very small complexity cost for an incredible amount of capability. Such is the nature of software.

But all of it comes with tradeoffs and you have to apply judgement. Just as it would be foolish to write almost anything these days in assembly, I think it would be almost as foolish to just default to a managed Amazon service because it scales without considering whether A) you actually need that scale and B) there are other concerns considerations as to why that service might not be the best technical fit (in particular, I've heard regrets due to overzealous adoption of DynamoDB on more than one occasion).

spectraldrift2• 11 months ago

You make a good point about experience. I've noticed an interesting paradox there.

The engineers who most aggressively advocate for bespoke solutions in the name of "simplicity" often have the least experience with their managed equivalents, which can lead to the regrets you mentioned. Conversely, many engineers who only know how to use managed services would struggle to build the simple, self-contained solution the author describes. True judgment requires experience with both worlds.

This is also why I think asking "do we actually need this scale?" is often the wrong question; it requires predicting the future. Since most solutions work at a small scale, a better framework for making a trade-off is:

* Scalability: Will this work at a higher scale if we need it to?

* Operations: What is the on-call and maintenance load?

* Implementation: How much new code and configuration is needed?

For these questions, managed services frequently have a clear advantage. The main caveat is cost-at-scale, but that’s a moot point in the context of the article's argument.

axblount• 11 months ago

"When in doubt, use brute force." --Ken Thompson

bwy• 11 months ago

From https://nshipster.com/uncertainty/ recently: "Working in software, the most annoying part of reaching Senior level is having to say “it depends” all the time. Much more fun getting to say “let’s ship it and iterate” as Staff or “that won’t scale” as a Principal."

IIUC, author is a Staff SWE, so this tracks.

See also "Worse is better" which has been debated a million times by now.

evo• 11 months ago

Another way I like to think about this is finding 'closeable' contexts to work in; that is, abstractions that are compact and logically consistent enough that you can close them out and take them on their external interface without always knowing the inner details. Metaphorically, your system can be a bunch of closed boxes that you can then treat as boxes, rather than a bunch of open boxes whose contents are spilling out and into each other. Think 'shipping containers' instead of longshoremen throwing loose cargo into your boat.

If you can do this regularly, you can keep the _effective_ cognitive size of the system small even as each closed box might be quite complex internally.

spelunker• 11 months ago

This is also good advice for personal projects - want to ship stuff? Just do what works, nobody cares!

ineedasername• 11 months ago

A few notes:

1) Sometimes the simplest things is still extremely complex

2) The simplest thing that works is often very hard to find

kiitos• 11 months ago

using unicorn as a positive example is, well, a pretty negative signal

unicorn, i.e. CGI, i.e. process-per-request, became anachronistic, gosh, more than 20 years ago at this point!

at least, if you're serving any kind of meaningful load -- a bash script in a while loop can serve 100RPS on an ec2.micro, that's (hopefully) not what anyone is talking about

BenoitEssiambre• 11 months ago

This is good advice but it can be difficult to define what simple means. The only technical way I was able to make sense of it is by targeting reducing code entropy and scopes (Inspired by how language models try to minimize Solomonoff/Kolmogorov entropy).

https://benoitessiambre.com/entropy.html https://benoitessiambre.com/integration.html

wtbdbrrr• 11 months ago

wonderful piece.

applies to the narrative

'unfuck' anything

as well. any industry and any

'behavioral lock in'

and so on.

uberduper• 11 months ago

I wanted to like this article and there's some things in there to agree with but ultimately it's a very uninteresting take with a very unconvincing rate limiting example.

System design requires competence with a lot of different tools: app servers, proxies, databases, caches, queues, and so on.

Yes! This is where I see so many systems go wrong. Complex software engineering paving over a lack of understanding of the underlying components.

As they gain familiarity with these tools, junior engineers naturally want to use them.

Hell yea! Understanding how kafka works so you don't build some crazy queue semantics on it. Understanding the difference between headless and clusterIP services in kubernetes so you don't have to build a software solution to the etcd problems you're having.

However, as with many skills, real mastery often involves learning when to do less, not more. The fight between an ambitious novice and an old master is a well-worn cliche in martial arts movies

Wait what? Surely you mean doing more by writing less code. Are you now saying that learning and using these well tested, well maintained, and well understood components is amateurish?

hyperpape• 11 months ago

You should do that too! Suppose you’ve got a Golang application that you want to add some kind of rate limiting to...Actually, are you sure your edge proxy doesn’t support rate limiting already? Could you just write a couple of lines in a config file instead of implementing the feature at all?

As I'm doing the simplest thing that could possibly work, I do not have an edge proxy.

Of course, the author doesn't mean _that_ kind of simplicity. There are always hidden assumptions about which pieces of complexity are assumed, and don't count against your complexity budget.

jiggawatts4• 11 months ago

This is the advice I've been unsuccessfully trying to drill into the heads of developers at a large organisation. Unfortunately, it turns out that the "simplest thing" can be banged out in a couple of days -- mere hours with an AI -- and that just isn't compatible with a career that is made up of 6-month contracting stints. It's much, much more lucrative to drag out every project over years and keep collecting that day-rate.

Many "industry best-practices" seen in this light are make-work, a technique for expanding simple things to fill the time to keep oneself employed.

For example, the current practice of dependency injection with interfaces, services, factories, and related indirections[1] is a wonderful time waster because it can be so easily defended.

"WHAT IF we need to switch from MySQL to Oracle DB one day?" Sure, that... could happen! It won't, but it could.

[1] No! You haven't created an abstraction! You've just done the same thing, but indirectly. You've created a proxy, not a pattern. A waste of your own time and the CPU's time.

AlotOfReading• 11 months ago

It's a pithy philosophy if you already know what it means to "work". You probably don't, especially if your system is human facing. Figuring out what "works" means is almost as difficult as building things in the first place. You may as well commit to building it twice [0].

[0] https://ratfactor.com/cards/build-it-twice

logsr• 11 months ago

design the best system for what your requirements actually look like right now

this is the key practical advice. when you start designing for hypothetical use cases that may never happen you are opening up an infinite scope of design complexity. setting hard specifications for what you actually need and building that simplifies the design process, at least, and if you start with that kind of mindset one can hope that it carries over to the implementation.

the simplest things always win because simple is repeatable. not every simple thing wins (many are not useful or have defects) but the winners are always simple.

amelius• 11 months ago

> design the best system for what your requirements actually look like right now

But don't forget to ask your manager if they want to be prepared for future scenarios A, B, or C.

And write down their answer for later reference.

RajT88• 11 months ago

I appreciate the sentiment, and absolutely think it should be kept in mind more.

But of course, it runs afoul of reality a lot of the time.

I recently got annoyed that the Windows Task scheduler just sometimes... Doesn't fucking work. Tasks don't run, and you get a crazy mystery error code. Never seen anything like it. Drives me nuts. Goddamned Microsoft making broken shit!

I mostly write Powershell scripts for automating my system, so I figure I'll make a task scheduler which uses the C# PSHost to run the scripts, and keep the task configuration in a SQLite database. Use a simple tray app with a windows form and EFCore for SQLite to read and write the task configuration. Didn't take too long, works great. I am again happy, and even get better logging out of failure conditions, since I can trap the whole error stream instead of an exit code.

My wife is starting a business, and I start to think about using the business to also have a software business piece to it. Maybe use the task scheduler as a component in a larger suite of remote management stuff for my wife's business which we sell to similar businesses.

Well. For it to be ready, it's got to be reliable and secure. Have to implement some checks to wait if the database is locked, no biggie. Oh, but what happens if another user running the tray icon somehow can lock the database, I've got to work out how to notify the other user that the database is locked... Also now tasks need to support running as a different user than the service is running under. Now I have to store those credentials somewhere, because they can't go into the SQLite DB. DPAPI stores keys in the user profile, so all this means now I have to implement support for alternative users in the installer (and do so securely, again with the DPAPI, storing the service's credentials).

I've just added a lot of complexity to what should be a pretty simple application, and with it some failure modes. Paying customers want new features, which add more complexity and more concern cases.

This is normal software entropy, and to some extent it's unavoidable.

bleepblap• 11 months ago

Had to make an account for this, but this is almost verbatim what the article is talking about:

Your wife is making a business, and you want to write some code to help.

Then suddenly your requirements balloon to multiple concurrent users, needing to have a system tray icon and then also the ability to take this code and sell it to other people. Wow this project is suddenly complex!

This is just "I need to be able to scale infinitely" written in different words. The complexity comes from wanting a ton of things before they're actually needed (with the wrinkle of wanting to use some previously written scheduler for this project.

screye• 11 months ago

It's great advice for an individual or a work item. It's great advice for teams where untamed programmers run rampant. It's good advice when teams are sane.

But, it's terrible for 2025's median software team. I know that isn't OP's intention. But inevitably, all good advice falls prey to misinterpretation.

In contemporary software orgs, build fast is the norm. PMs, managers, sales & leadership want Engg to build something that works, with haste. In this imagination, simple = fast. Let me say this again. No, you cannot convince them otherwise. To the median org, SIMPLE = FAST. The org always chooses the fastest option, well past the point of diminishing returns. Now once something exists, product managers and org leaders will push to deploy it and sales teams will sell dreams around it. Now you have an albatross around your neck. Welcome to life as a fire fighter.

For the health of a company and the oncall's sanity, Engg must tug at the rope in the opposite direction from (perceived) simplicity. The negotiated middle ground can get close to the 'simple' that OP proposes. But today, if Engg starts off with 'simple', they will be rewarded with a 'demo on life support'. At a time when vibe coding is trivial, I fear things will get worse before they get better.

All that being said, OP's intended advice is one that I personally live by. But often, simple is slow. So, I keep it to myself.

nojs• 11 months ago

Claude is great at this! If you avoid refactoring at all costs and put everything as close as possible to the relevant code, you maximise the chance it works and minimise pesky DRY complexities.

mactavish88• 11 months ago

A lot of engineers design by trying to think of the “ideal” system: something well-factored, near-infinitely scalable, elegantly distributed, and so on.
Instead, spend that time understanding the current system deeply, then do the simplest thing that could possibly work.

I'd argue that a fair amount of the former results in the ability to do the latter.

There's a substantial amount of wisdom that goes into designing "simple" systems (simple to understand when reading the code). Just as there's a substantial amount of wisdom that goes into making "simple" changes to those systems.

fijiaarone5• 11 months ago

Mostly I agree with what the author is saying. But there is a clear distinction between the simplest “system” and do the simplest thing.

The simplest thing to do is almost always the easiest, but knowing what is easiest thing to do is a lot trickier —- see Javascript frameworks.

But I think I disagree with the author’s second axiom:

“2. Simple systems are less internally-connected.”

Creating interfaces is more complex than not. Even if it leads to a cleaner design because of interface boundaries. At the least, creating those boundaries adds complexity, and I don’t mean “more effort”. I mean it in the sense that creating functions is more complex than calling “goto”. And it took decades to invent the mechanism needed to call functions —- which is probably the next most simple thing.

However, using call stacks and named pointers and memory separation (functions) leads to vastly improved simplicity of the system as the system as a while grows in complexity.

So in fact, using your own in-memory rate limiter may be a simpler implementation than using Redis, but it it also violates the second principle (using clear interfaces leads to simpler systems.)

And it turns the author’s first premise — Gunicorn is simpler than Puma. Because Puma does the equivalent of building their own rate limiter — managing its own memory and using threads instead of processes.

And Gunicorn does the equivalent of using Redis — externalizing the complexity.

What Gunicorn did was simpler to implement (because it relies on an existing isolated architecture - Unix processes and files) but means it has a greater complexity (if you take into account that it needs that whole system to work.

However that system is a brilliant set of reductions in complexity itself, but it runs up against limitations and performance at some point.

Puma takes on itself more complexity to make administering the server less complex and more performant under load. Also, because it is, in a sense, reinventing the wheel, it lacks the distillation of simplicity that is Unix.

So, less internally connected systems are easier to expand and maintain and interface boundaries lead to less complex systems as a whole, but are not, in themselves less complex.

Limitations in the system that cause performed problems (like Unix processes and function calls) are not necessarily “more simple than can possibly work” —- but the implementations of those abstractions are not perfect and could be improved.

Sometimes it’s not clear where to push the complexity, and sometimes it’s not clear what the right abstraction level is; but mostly it’s about making due with the existing architecture you have, and not having the time or resources to fix it. Until the complexity at your level reaches a point that it’s worth adding complexity at a higher level due to being unable to add the right amount of complexity at a lower level.

fijiaarone5• 11 months ago

Mostly I agree with what the author is saying. But there is a clear distinction between the simplest “system” and do the simplest thing.

The simplest thing to do is almost always the easiest, but knowing what is easiest thing to do is a lot trickier —- see Javascript frameworks.

Scubabear68• 11 months ago

I get it.

YAGANI.

A term coined by consultants who don’t understand an industry who basically say “do the least possible thing that will work” because they don’t understand the domain and don’t understand what requirements are often non-negotiable table stakes of complexity you need to compete.

It reminded me of a Martin Fowler post where he was showing implementation of discounts in some system and advocating to just hard code the first discount in the method (literally getDiscount() {return 0.5}).

Even the most shallow analysis would show this was incredibly stupid and short sighted.

But this was the state of the art, or so we were told.

See also Ward Cunningham trying and failing to solve Sudoku using TDD.

The reality is most business domains are actually complex, and the one who best tackles that complexity up front can take home all the marbles.

gavmor• 11 months ago

Undoubtedly, Fowler suggested this as an incomplete step in the development process, essentially to get the code to compile.

Incredible that we can tar both complexity and simplicity with the brush of "consultant BS."

zahlman3• 11 months ago

A better explanation of this is on my blog todo list, but:

Even the most shallow analysis would show this was incredibly stupid and short sighted.

Why? Yes, there's a high probability that this single line of code is ultimately wrong. But having it allows for testing the system (to ensure that getDiscount gets called, that the resulting price is between zero and the undiscounted price, etc.) and it can trivially be replaced when the actual discounting logic becomes known. Nothing can reasonably be called "short sighted" that doesn't actually limit you in the future.

See also Ward Cunningham trying and failing to solve Sudoku using TDD.

It was Ron Jeffries who was struggling with Sudoku, not Ward Cunningham.

And he didn't struggle because of "doing simple things", but because he didn't actually know how to solve Sudoku, and rather than doing research (or trying a few by hand and reflecting on his own thought process) he expected to gain special insight into the solver by modeling the problem more accurately.

If he had actually known, then he would have just applied the same techniques to modeling the solver, and avoided all the embarrassment.

TDD is orthogonal to "doing the simplest thing", just preached by many of the same people. The problem isn't with writing tests for early iterations of the project that aren't anywhere near fully functional. The problem is that the making the tests pass doesn't actually teach you anything about what the next step of functionality is. You still have to actually think, and Jeffries didn't have a proper basis to ground his thinking.

Norvig's approach to the problem involved some clever hacks that aren't necessarily the best thing from a code maintainability standpoint. But he resisted the temptation to create a prematurely generalized system for solving constraint-propagation problems, trying to create some generic abstract representation of a "constraint" etc. In essence, that code didn't diverge from what the XP gurus preached; it just didn't follow their specific methods ("OO" modeling that's heavily based on creating new classes, TDD etc.).

I independently came to the same conclusions about how to solve the problem, however many years ago. Recently, I was reminded of the story (I think via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42953168) and tried writing a solver from scratch as an exercise. My code was certainly not as "clever" as Norvig's, but only a bit longer and IMO much better factored.

ocdtrekkie• 11 months ago

One of my favorite movie quotes is from Scotty in Star Trek: "The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain."

Complexity is sometimes necessary, but it always creates more ways things can break.

smitty1e• 11 months ago

I call it the "Ditt-Kuh-Pow", the Dumbest Thing That Could Possibly Work.

Said that in in a telephone call one time, and the guy leading that was all "I'm mildly disturbed that you had a verbalization for that."

anonu• 11 months ago

The problem is sometimes you don't get the right feedback to know when to stop building.

kid64• 11 months ago

The author should actually design a successful large software system and try again.

wanderingmind• 11 months ago

This consistent with Gall's law, that says complex systems that work can only be achieved by building complexity over simple systems. Complex systems built from scratch do not work. So build the simplest system that works and then keep adding complexity to it based on requirements

journal2• 11 months ago

until? what's the threshold here? does complexity have a final boss?

journal2• 11 months ago

i want to hear an input from winapi team on this.

arthurofbabylon• 11 months ago

Useful principle. But… (sorry to make a simple phrase more complex) the notion just scratches the surface of complexity management.

I appreciate “Philosophy of Software Design” by Ousterhout. I recently read that while rebuilding a text editor. Mind blowing experience. There is a lot of opportunity to more tightly encapsulate logic, to more clearly abstract a system, to keep a system simple yet powerful and extensible. I believe I became twice as good of a developer just by reading a chapter a day and sticking with the workflow.

kmoser• 11 months ago

Not arguing against this article but aren't all these ideas already well known in the industry? Start with an MVP, don't optimize prematurely, avoid writing brittle code (systems, really), abstract implementation details away when possible, and KISS.

Leo-thorne• 11 months ago

We once rebuilt an old system and went with the simplest thing that could work. It ran great for the first few weeks, but then all kinds of edge cases started creeping in. We ended up spending more time patching things up.

m463• 11 months ago

Honestly, this is how all computing works.

For example, chips just barely work.

If they work too well, you could shrink the chip until it barely works making it cheaper or faster or use less power.

That said, although this exercise is kind of interesting - like playing jenga - it might not be fun or satisfying.

better faster cheaper - sometimes you need to choose better.

zahlman3• 11 months ago

For example, chips just barely work.

This seems a bit overstated (except perhaps for certain recent Intel fabs) considering that they do billions of operations per second and a single error could completely invalidate a complex system in the worst case.

GarnetFloride• 11 months ago

It seems like a lot of people think that the first draft/prototype/whatever has to be perfect.

It doesn't. It never is. It can't be.

My favorite example of this was the Moon shot. Each step was learning how to do just that one step. Mercury was just about getting into orbit, not easy even now with SpaceX though they are standing on the shoulders of those giants. Then Gemini for multiple people and orbital maneuvering (that experience gained them lots of learning) and then Apollo 8 was still a dress rehearsal even though they flew around the Moon.

Each step HAD to be simple because complexity weighed too much. But each of those simple steps were still wildly complex.

Every time I would dive in and code up something that I though was easy, it would blow up in some weird way, and I have found that doing each step individually and getting it right, might sound like I was going really slow, but it was smoother so it was faster in the end because I wasn't chasing bugs in all the places, but just one.

msephton• 11 months ago

There is a sign on a wall at Apple that reads: "Simplify. Simplify. Simplify." (with the first two struck out) https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenmakovsky/2012/12/06/inside-a...

Nevermark• 11 months ago

Looking over the threads running here, it is interesting how differently the article's title/point is being taken, filtered through different commenter situations and experiences.

I don't see it as a blind prescription.

It doesn't imply that choosing what is simple, will be simple. Or that simplest, will be simple. Or that this is a process uniquely immune from problems or tradeoffs.

Just a reminder to never forget to aim for simplest.

A tautological cookie fortune, of something important we often functionally forget or slide on.

There is a lot of wisdom in recognizing and repeating the most important "mantras of the obvious". And listening to them reformulated, in other ways, by other people.

The greatest craftbeings never stop revisiting the basics.

travisgriggs• 11 months ago

All too often I see this mantra used to justify doing the “easiest thing that could possibly work.” Which in my experience is not the same thing. They can overlap, and often upstream simplicity can create a downstream effect of ease for consumers. Simplicity often requires some real effort to execute well.

bubblyworld2• 11 months ago

Simplicity is brittle. Perhaps we should take a page from nature. Nothing in nature in simple, and yet it has built some of the most robust systems (by far) that we know of.

Can your software run for millions of years?

tim3333• 11 months ago

The sun is basically a ball of hydrogen that fuses into helium but it seems to be hanging in there.

bubblyworld2• 11 months ago

The sun doesn't solve any problems in a useful sense. I'm talking about life! I thought that would be obvious haha.

dlenski3• 11 months ago

A lot of engineers design by trying to think of the “ideal” system: something well-factored, near-infinitely scalable, elegantly distributed, and so on.

Was it Donald Knuth who said "premature optimization is that root of all evil"?

This article made this point very well, especially regarding the obsession with "scaling" in the SaaS world.

I've seen thousands and thousands of developer hours completely wasted, because developers were forced to massively overcomplicate greenfield code in anticipation of some entirely hypothetical future scaling requirement which either never materialized (95% of the time) or which did appear but in such a different form that the original solution only got in the way (remaining 5%).

John Ousterhout’s Philosophy of Software Design makes the case for simplicity in a book-length form. I really like how he emphasizes the importance of design simplicity for the maintainability of software; this is where I've seen it matter the most in practice.

atomicnumber3• 11 months ago

My current company is in that 5% part right now. Tremendous effort invested into the system, everyone involved was very proud of themselves. Unfortunately the way we actually needed to scale was almost completely untouched by any of this architecture astronomy, so we have both a terrifically complicated system - very difficult to change things without potential breakage or regression - AND it doesn't scale at all.

I don't mind, I don't blame people for not predicting the future - it's a tough game. But god the hubris and attitude we put up with until the crows came home to roost.

froh3• 11 months ago

thanks for sharing and I couldn't agree more.

I assume you mean astrology (prophecy), not astronomy (science)?

dlenski3• 11 months ago

Unfortunately the way we actually needed to scale was almost completely untouched by any of this architecture astronomy

"Architecture astronomy" 100%, I love this phrase. Did you come up with it?

But god the hubris and attitude we put up with until the crows came home to roost.

I feel this, I feel this.

signa11• 11 months ago

hard disagree (fwiw).

this *tactical* style of development is the same thing propounded by TDD folks. there is no design, just a wierdly glued together mishmash of things that just happen to work.

i am (fwiw once again) not against unit-testing, that is almost always needed.

del_operator• 11 months ago

Get it out. Make it work. Love your work.

cyprx• 11 months ago

it won't work when every single PRD now has the word "extensible". i think overcomplexity often comes from requirements/ business usecases first

cmertayak• 11 months ago

It nails the value of keeping things simple, and I think the link to cognitive load deserves even more emphasis. In most of the cases, simplifying means reducing the cognitive load. Sometimes consolidating pieces with DRY, sometimes using design patterns, sometimes decomposing things into services...

Every extra details or workaround increases the number of things you need to keep in your head, not just when building the system, but every time you come back to maintain or extend it. "Simple systems have fewer 'moving pieces': fewer things you have to think about when you're working with them."

Simplicity isn't just about getting the job done quickly; it's about making sure future you (or someone else) can actually understand and safely change the system later. Reducing cognitive load with simplicity pays off long after the job is done.

cranx• 11 months ago

I think a lot of engineers think, “I thought of a complicated set of abstract ideas that mean nothing to anyone else but will demonstrate my superior intellect” and then make that. It took a lot of self control to not curse.

michalc• 11 months ago

real mastery often involves learning when to do less, not more

Really love and agree with this, and (shameless plug?) I think really aligns with a way of working I (and some colleagues) have been working on: https://delivervaluedaily.dev/

motorest5• 11 months ago

I think this article actually expresses a dangerous, risk-prone approach to problem solving, and one which ultimately causes more problems than the ones it solves.

The risk is misunderstanding the problems they are solving, and ignoring all the constraints that drove the need for some key design traits that were in place to actually solve the problem (i.e., complexity)

Take the following example from the article:

You should do that too! Suppose you’ve got a Golang application that you want to add some kind of rate limiting to. What’s the simplest thing that could possibly work? Your first idea might be to add some kind of persistent storage (say, Redis) to track per-user request counts with a leaky-bucket algorithm. That would work! But do you need a whole new piece of infrastructure?

Let's ignore the mistake of describing Redis as persistent storage. The whole reason why rate limiting data is offloaded to a dedicated service is that you want to enforce rate limiting across all instances of an API. Thus all instances update request counts on a shared data store to account for all traffic hitting across all instances regardless of how many they might be. This data store needs to be very fast to minimize micro services tax and is ephemeral. Hence why a memory cache is often used.

And why do "per-user request counts in memory" not work? Because you enforce rate-limiting to prevent brownouts and ultimately denials of service triggered in your backing services. Each request that hits your API typically triggers additional requests to internal services such as memory stores, querying engines, etc. Your external facing instances are scaled to meet external load, but they also create load to internal services. You enforce rate-limiting to prevent unexpected high request rates to generate enough load to hit bottlenecks in internal services which can't or won't scale. If you enforce rate limits per instance, scaling horizontally will inadvertently lift your rate limits as well and thus allow for brownouts, thus defeating the whole purpose of introducing rate limiting.

Also, leaky bucket algorithms are employed to allow traffic bursts but still prevent abuse. This is a very mundane scenario that happens on pretty much all services consumed by client apps. Once an app is launched, they typically do authentication flows and fetch data required in app starts and get data, etc. After app inits the app is back to baseline request rates. If you have a system that runs more than a single API instance, requests are spread over instances by a load balancer. This means a user's request can be routed to any instance at an unspecified proportion. So how do you prevent abuse while still allowing these bursts to take place? Do you scale your services to handle peak loads 24/7 to accommodate request bursts from all your active users at any given moment? Or do you allow for momentary bursts spread across all instances, regardless of what instances they hit?

Sometimes a problem can be simple. Sometimes it can be made too simple, but you accept the occasional outage. But sometimes you can't afford frequent outages and you understand a small change, like putting up a memory cache instance, is all it takes to eliminate failure modes.

And what changed in the analysis to understand that your simple solution is no solution at all? Only your understanding of the problem domain.

aryehof• 11 months ago

Do the simplest thing that could possibly work …

That advice these days surely means having an LLM vibecode a mess of something?

Is such obvious and unquantifiable advice actually useful?

zkmon• 11 months ago

Principles like these deserve to be part of curriculum for undergrad courses. People are incorrectly trained to go for some ideal forms at the cost of complexity and fragility. Every approach, idea should be put to ruthless cost-benefit comparison, without any regard to who is proposing it, or how it sounds.

Education and training sometimes enforces prejudices, rules and stigmas that evade inspection of the subject matter in raw form.

Preference to idealism probably emerged from peace times which have no struggle. Someone would be obsessed with perfectness of a sculpture only when they don't need to hunt for the next meal. The real world runs on minimal, conservative, durable and robust approaches.

randyrand• 11 months ago

if only designing simple systems as it’s easy as it sounds.

it takes maybe 3 to 5 rewrites before you truly grasp a problem.

moffkalast• 11 months ago

Nooo you can't use deterministic math, you gotta use kalman filters and particle filters and factor graphs and spend three months tweaking parameters to get a 5% improvement! /s

Like alright in some situations that's the only thing that could possibly work, but shoving that complexity into every state estimator without even having a way to figure out the actual covariance of the input data is a bit much. Something that behaves in an expected way and works reliably with less accuracy beats a very complex system that occasionally breaks completely imo.

mcv• 11 months ago

It's important to understand the difference between easy and simple. It's easy to add complexity, it can sometimes be hard to keep things simple.

But with that in mind, I do agree that a lot of systems are more complex than they need to be. I like to keep things simple.

Of course scalability adds complexity, and sometimes you need that. But you don't always need that, and making things scalable that don't need to be, makes them harder to understand and maintain.

stpedgwdgfhgdd• 11 months ago

metanonsense• 11 months ago

I would be very cautious to give an advice like this to my team. Making a thing simple is actually very hard, and many, who hear the words, may just equate „simple thing“ with „first thing that comes to mind“, which may eventually turn into a nightmare of complexity.

tanelpoder• 11 months ago

When I'm on the fence about some (technical) decision, I use a "razor": if all options seem equal, go with whichever is the simpler one. The results are ok so far and it has been great for reducing my brain-energy spent on pontification and early optimization too far ahead.

I liked the post, but these kinds of articles do make sense to people who've already been through the trenches & view the advice from their seasoned experience PoV and apply it accordingly. But if people without such experience follow it to the letter just because it's written, can have surprises ahead.

jchook• 11 months ago

Obligatory reference to Simple Made Easy https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/

I watch this talk about once per year to remind myself to eschew complexity.

yehat• 11 months ago

That principle is valid also outside the software engineering domain. Except for German engineers...

nickm12• 11 months ago

This piece is arguing against what is often called "over-engineering" or unnecessary abstraction (YAGNI). Over-engineering is a problem in software systems because it generally takes longer to build and it makes the systems unnecessarily more difficult to understand. While a problem, I don't think it is the most important design issue I see in software systems.

The bigger problem I see is lack of abstraction, or systems where the components have too much knowledge of each other. These are fast to build and initially work just as well as the more "heavily engineered" systems. However as the code evolves to meet changing requirements, what happens is that code becomes more complex, either through even more coupling or through ad hoc abstractions that get implemented haphazardly.

It can be really difficult to know where to draw the lines, though. When you are trying to decide between a simpler and more complex option, I think it's worth starting with the simplest thing that could possibly work, but build it in a way that you can change that decision without impacting the rest of the system.

On a tangent, I'm not a fan of Uncle Bob (to put it mildly) but this topic makes me think of his quote "a good architecture allows decisions to be deferred". I would restate it as "a good architecture allows decisions to be changed in isolation".

matthewsinclair• 11 months ago

It's worth quoting "Gall's Law" [0] here:

“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.”

I have this up on my wall and refer to it constantly (for both tech and non-tech challenges).

[0] https://blog.prototypr.io/galls-law-93c8ef8b651e

bob1029• 11 months ago

If we were willing to abandon all of our tooling and technology tribalism, it would become feasible to replace many B2B SaaS products with a scheduled ETL job that runs on an MSSQL or Oracle box once per day. Most business processes can be modeled as extract-transform-load. The business would generally agree that fancy spreadsheets on the server is much simpler compared to a custom codebase. Especially, when granted access to this data and involved in its schema design.

conradfr• 11 months ago

It often feels like a large part of the dev world is just coding some fancy gui & system for what could be (or used to be) Excel + Access :)

jdblair• 11 months ago

but it was so much fun to write my own serial networking protocol! and my 2nd stage bootloader for arduino!

...and by the time I finished, the esp32c hardware was released and I didn't need it anymore.

daitangio• 11 months ago

Right in theory hard to do in practice. Also business needs are awful complex, guys.

Gehinnn• 11 months ago

Is doing a refactoring ever the simplest thing that could have been done? I think "do the simplest thing" should be "do the thing that increases complexity the least" (which might be difficult to do and require restructuring).

progx• 11 months ago

Do something simple. Dream vs. reality.

867-5309• 11 months ago

instructions unclear

return segfault -1;

zduoduo• 11 months ago

Indeed, this is a good way

silverkiwi2• 11 months ago

Copy/Paste save as system prompt

silverkiwi2• 11 months ago

Copy/paste/save as system prompt

phendrenad2• 11 months ago

I think there's a natural rhythm to complexity. After a tech crash, everyone abandons what are generally regarded as best practices, and just writes scrappy code, I.E. the "simplest thing". Then, there's a backlash against it, and consultants make a lot of money teaching people how to avoid "code smells". Then a bubble forms and code quality stops mattering much relative to marketing and sales effectiveness.

dihedihe• 11 months ago

Broblim

austin-cheney• 11 months ago

Simplicity applies universally and is almost always more correct. Simple just means the option of fewer steps. Simple does not mean easy, so therefore simplicity as a principle is always objective and measurable.

Where people fail on this most frequently is reasoning in first person pronouns whether explicitly or implicitly and whether or not stated, thought, or considered. Simplicity is but merely the result from a comparison of measures. It’s not about you and has nothing to do with your opinion.

desio• 11 months ago

shouldn't it be "the simplest possible thing that could work"?

mingtianzhang• 11 months ago

This is also called occam's razor principle.

shellkr• 11 months ago

I think I learned this from Arch Linux and their focus on the KISS principle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle). This is also something that goes beyond the computing sphere. It is really a good principle for life in general.

Starlevel004• 11 months ago

The simplest option usually also comes with all the drawbacks of being the simplest option. "Keep it simple" is one of the more irritating thought-terminating cliches.

janderson215• 11 months ago

Simple rarely means the first thing that comes to mind and is something you have to work towards, so I would think it’s more stimulating than terminating.

There is more than one way to skin a cat and using a weed whacker probably isn’t the best. It might even make sense to acquire a new tool.

tim3333• 11 months ago

Dunno if it's really thought-terminating. I mean consider Warren Buffett who has gone with a simple strategy of valuing businesses and buying them or parts of them for less than they are worth or buying two dollar bills for a dollar as he put it. There's a lot of thought underlying that though because then you have to understand businesses and as those interact with everything in the world there's understanding that too. So it's simple in some ways and not in others. But it worked well - I think he'd be the world's richest if he hadn't given a load away to charity.

boricj2• 11 months ago

I disagree. You prototype the simplest thing that could possibly work. Then, you design stuff so that you don't end up regretting it later.

I happen to have a recent example with an add-on card. For reasons that I won't get into, we needed both insurance against major rearchitecturing, as well as leverage synergy with other product lines when it comes to configuration. That led me to design a fairly intricate library that runs visitors against a data model, as well as a mechanism where the firmware dumps its entire state as a BSON document in a dedicated Flash partition before upgrading. That gave us the peace of mind that whatever happens, we can always just restore from that document and nuke everything else when booting a newer firmware for the first time.

The simplest thing that could possibly work would've been to not do any of that and let future firmware versions deal with it. Instead, I designed it so that I don't end up regretting it later, regardless of how the product evolved.

The only point I do regret was missing one piece of information to save on the initial release-to-manufacturing version. I had to put in one hack that if the saved document has version 1.0, then go spelunking in the raw flash to retrieve that piece of information where it was in version 1.0 and slipstream it into the document before processing it. Given the data storage mechanism of that platform, I'd be tearing my hair apart dealing with multiple incompatible data layouts across firmware versions if I did the simplest thing.

froh3• 11 months ago

I think your version _is_ the simplest thing that works: software updates are part of what needs to work in embedded. else you brick devices and have to send technicians to the device, right?

boricj2• 11 months ago

The simplest thing that would've worked was for the initial firmware to do nothing besides putting the new firmware in the secondary slot, tell mcuboot to upgrade and then reboot. That shifts the responsibility of working upgrades to later firmware revisions, at the cost of significant technical debt and extra development costs in the future.

My point is that the simplest thing that could possibly work disregards state and time as factors. Good engineers balance all requirements to derive the simplest solution that works; great engineers do so while avoiding visits from irate future colleagues.

egorfine3• 11 months ago

What’s wrong with doing the simplest thing?

Staff. You've got developers and they will continue working on a product oftentimes way past the "perfect" stage.

Case in point: log aggregation services like Sentry/etc. It always starts with "it's so complex, let's make a sane log ingestion service with a simple web viewer" and then it inevitably spirals into an unfathomable pile of abstractions and mind-boggling complexity to a point where it is literally no longer usable.

PickledChris• 11 months ago

This is an interesting point, but there's slightly more to it than that. When something is simple and does the job well, it has limitations. The problem is that adding each subsequent feature has a small benefit and a small, but immeasurable cost. Sometimes that cost outweighs the benefit, but knowing that before the fact is very hard, and removing features is almost impossible as people shout disproportionately loudly about losing things.

It's similar to the problem of regulation. Looking at each individual law, it often seems reasonable. It's only when there are 10,000, and everything grinds to a halt, that people realise there's a problem.

egorfine3• 11 months ago

True.

IMHO the log services example is excellent to illustrate this: the path that leads to their hairball of complexity is perfectly clear and every solution they do is extremely logical and obvious.

This is why these services are so much similar.

But the end result is always too complex and it seems to me that "perfect" point does not exist for this line of products.

sarchertech• 11 months ago

Everything is a trade off and experience is knowing when it’s worth it to add a hook for future expansion and when you can wait.

The problem is that when you let people without experience design things, they tend towards what I call “what if driven development”.

At every point in the design they ask what if I need to extend this later. Then they add a hook for that future expansion.

When we are training juniors the best thing is not to show them all the best practices in Clean Code because most of them gravitate towards overengineering anyway. If you give them permission and “best practices” to justify their desires, they write infuriatingly complicated layers upon layers of indirection. The thing to do is to teach them to do the simplest thing that works—just like this blog post says.

Will that result in some regrets when they build something that isn’t extensible? Absolutely! But it’s generally much easier to add a missing abstraction than it is to remove a bad one.

baronswindle• 11 months ago

In my experience, simplicity can be a bit of a slippery concept. Often, people use the word “simple” to mean “intuitive to me”.

dondraper3611• 11 months ago

That's exactly the "simple vs easy" difference that Rich Hickey emphasized in his famous talk.

sdeframond• 11 months ago

In civil engineering they say that "Any idiot can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands.”

egorfine3• 11 months ago

An extremely important classic to consider: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architect...

sesm• 11 months ago

Author's definition of simplicity is self-contradictory: fewer moving pieces result in highly-specialized monolith systems, while breaking up everything into components with clear interfaces results in more moving pieces.

anon63622• 11 months ago

- Robust

- Simple

- Easy

- Fast

- Understandable by mere mortals

- Memory efficient

- CPU efficient

- Storage efficient

- Network efficient

- Safe

Pick up to 3

rossdavidh• 11 months ago

I have worked at places where, for a website that would require one server (or at most two or three, for redundancy), Kubernetes and React and all the trappings of a humongous website were implemented. It took me a bit to figure out why we were doing all this for a website which would basically just publish some static html: it was for resume building. The lead dev, and the project manager, were not working on that project (a website which would never get all that big), they were working on a resume for FAANG.

Once you see this, you see it everywhere. 90% of the places using "modern" web technology, are built as if they were anticipating FAANG scale, not because they are, but because the people building them hoped to be working at FAANG soon.

plxio32• 11 months ago

I have 100% the same experience. I would say it's often also an ego thing, not only resume building. I.e. the ego can't handle building a simple solution, the dev builds FAANG scale solutions therefore he/she is a great developer.

dondraper3611• 11 months ago

Even in this thread, there was a comment (now deleted) saying that a staff engineer at GitHub is unlikely to know what real scale is.

cratermoon• 11 months ago

We had this discussion around "the simplest thing" way back in the late 90s/early 2000s when XP was getting started. One comment I remember well is, "it's do the simplest thing, not the stupidest thing". Maybe a boring relational database is the simple thing, compared to some distributed eventually consistent map-reduce system using HDFS. Or maybe a simple key-value store like Memcached is all you need.

Even in complex domains, the aphorism, "everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler" applies.

As for working at scale, complex systems are made of small, simple, working systems, where dependencies between them are limited and manageable. Without an effort to keep interdependencies simple, the result is a Big Ball of Mud, and we all know how well that works.

sltr• 11 months ago

I'm feeling surprised that ao far nobody has mentioned Fred Brooks' essential vs incidental complexity.

evelant• 11 months ago

The more years I've been developing software (and it's been awhile) the more I come to find that the answer is almost always "it depends". The definition of "simple" depends on the case, the requirements, and the level of uncertainty about the future. The definition of "complex" depends on the case, the requirements, and the level of uncertainty about the future.

I've run into a lot of situations where doing the "simplest thing that could possibly work" ultimately led to mountains of pain and failure. I've also run into situations where things were over-engineered to account for situations that never came to be resulting in similar pain.

It boils down to "it depends" -- a careful analysis of the requirements, tradeoffs, future possibilities, and a mountain of judgement based on experience.

For sure, err on the side of "simple" when there's uncertainty but don't be dogmatic about it. Apply simple principles like loose coupling, pure functions, minimal state, avoid shared state, pick boring tools, and so on to ensure that "the simplest thing that could possibly work" doesn't become "the simplest thing that used to work but is now utter hell in the face of the unexpected". It all depends.

rectang• 11 months ago

"I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter." — Blaise Pascal

I fully agree with the author about the desirability of simplicity. I feel it in my bones, as someone with a background in the arts who has spent endless hours agonizing over tiny details and discarding perfectly good sections which nevertheless did not serve the whole.

What this article doesn't emphasize is that simplicity has cost. Shaving down a pile of yak hair isn't enough to reveal Brancusi's Bird in Space[1] — it needs to be visualized from multiple angles, tested, reshaped, re-imagined over and over.

In engineering, simplicity is one more axis to optimize against. For systems that endure, some measure of time spent simplifying will be worth it. But I find that when I make that argument, my case is strengthened by bearing in mind the size of the spend.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/69/Bird_in_...

bwfan123• 11 months ago

I would disagree with the premise of this article.

All this talk of simplicity may mislead one into building something that just about works, and calling it a day. I believe that is a mistaken approach in science and engineering. Instead, there should be a deeper understanding of the limits and constraints on the problem. In my view, the focus should be on the problem and its constraints rather than on the nature of the solution.

An analogy in terms of algorithms would be: Why take the pains to implement an O(nlogn) solution to sorting when you can implement a O(n^2) solution which is far simpler. ie, be satisfied with a feasible solution instead of seeking what could be more optimal. The road to interesting insights may not be linear and incremental. Doing the simplest thing at all times is an incremental greedy approach.

oldslang• 11 months ago

As a PM focusing mostly on new product development, my mantra to engineering was "Do the easy, cheap stuff first." The corollary was, "If we are very lucky, we will live in regret because the product has taken off but the architecture is now obviously wrong." This was understandably frustrating to many engineers because they wanted me to have a certainty about the correctness of what we were building that I just never had. Every good idea I had for product emerged over time, often years and countless false steps. I could never figure out how to avoid the false steps so the goal became to keep cost and effort down along the way.

ianberdin• 11 months ago

I name it: use the sharp knife instead of building Combine Harvester.

aleksiy123• 11 months ago

I've realized that people have different understandings/definitions of what "simple" means.

Many people think "simple" is equivalent to easy/fast.

It often isn't. Often complexity is actually easy/fast. But simple is hard as it requires deeply understanding the problem, and fitting the right solution to where there is nothing to "simplify".

mahirsaid• 11 months ago

Ideas are simple, and so on. i don't understand the reason behind complicated coding to make an app/service so buggy. at this point there are plenty of already practiced true implementations.

perilunar• 11 months ago

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Terre des hommes, 1939

paulified• 11 months ago

I think if you keep in mind we're talking simple and not easy, then it's sort of like "of course". And there's definitely a sort of elegance in a simple design, like how Apple does hardware, that still manages to "get the job done". So in that sense it's more of a considered constraint than neglect.

But I think there's also a danger of this becoming cargo-culted/dogmatic to the point where's it _is_ the messy, short-sighted solution. I remember many years ago working at a company that adopted XP and TDD and the whole "write the failing test and then the simplest thing to make the test pass". Well-intentioned but with some experience you quickly realise that sure, just returning a hard-coded value will make the test pass simply, but I _know_ there's more requirements coming and that code's going to have to change. So to with system design, I suspect there's also a case for experience telling you that the changes are coming. Maybe this still fits into the "possibly work" part.

The other thing I've seen in my time is that you don't always get the capacity to come back change the design later. So while it's great (and probably bordering on being clever for clever's sake) at times to do the simple thing, hedging your bets in terms of how a system will have changes piled on can often be a good move too.

I think that the main issue with these kind of concepts is they always sound great on the face of them but in the real world it's never that simple :P

Do the simplest thing that could possibly work

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