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Do the simplest thing that could possibly work

(www.seangoedecke.com)
1070 points dondraper36 | 1 comments | 29 Aug 25 19:05 UTC | HN request time: 0.202s | source
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al_borland ◴[29 Aug 25 19:36 UTC] No.45068433[source]▶
“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.

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IAmBroom ◴[29 Aug 25 19:41 UTC] No.45068506[source]▶
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...

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1. al_borland ◴[29 Aug 25 20:52 UTC] No.45069260[source]▶
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.