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Do the simplest thing that could possibly work

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1070 points dondraper36 | 1 comments | 29 Aug 25 19:05 UTC | HN request time: 0.219s | source
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sfpotter ◴[29 Aug 25 20:36 UTC] No.45069112[source]▶
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.
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1. switchbak ◴[29 Aug 25 20:51 UTC] No.45069256[source]▶
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.