Radical Simplicity

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[codyoftheinternet]

lol I went to school for aerospace engineering and their was this professor in a propulsions class that said, “we compare hard thing to rocket science, but rocket science is mostly plumbing”.
I didn’t end up building rockets but I always try to remember that the really genius things are a lot of simple concepts built on top of each other (very neatly).

[onegamingmoose]

“An idiot admires complexity, a genius admires simplicity” – Terry A. Davis

[stephanschmidt]

Ah so this is where the traffic for my website is coming from :-)

[JorisGriffioen]

I don't think we love complexity as such, I think we love feeling like wizards. And a lot of the work is not wizardry, it's bricklaying and plumbing.

Edit: LOL just reached the plumbing part. Well then.

[RT-mnpb]

You overlooked TIME. One overlooked problem with the overly complex environments we have today is not that we want them, or that we decided to get them and build them. It's because they grew like a Coral Reef. The technology parts, products and architectural layers accumulated over time. Each piece probably made sense at the time. Retiring or replacing parts is hard. And over time you have to get all your pieces working together. Eventually you have something that's not pretty but hopefully functional. That's just the real world.

[salvatoreshiggerino]

My father warned me against getting into computers because you end up doing nothing but plumbing. I thought what does he know, as he had never owned a personal computer in his life. Turns he did know more than I could possibly imagine.

[AG-urlj]

Without rigorous definitions, ‘simplicity’ and ‘complexity’ are just emotions. You _feel_ something is simple or complex

[kahnzo]

I spend all my time on planning. And none of my time on development, or solving problems. I have accomplished nothing. Therefore, I have optimized for simplicity.

[ameddin]

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. - Gall's Law

[xxvmvxx]

don't reinvent the wheel, but lean on publicly available knowledge on how wheels are constructed instead of licensing the wheel factory for X dollars a month because you need 4 of them.

[ZeroUm_]

One of the reasons why I enjoy working with trading exchange services is that we literally have no CPU time left other than what we use for business code and service reliability.

The only way to reach tens to a few hundred microseconds of RTT is by running the code with zero fat and waste.

[JGComments]

Simplicity enables speed. And more importantly, it enables the idiots who come after you to understand what you did so they don’t feel the need to tear it all down and rewrite it.

[Cyanide]

Most people that go into engineering fields (of whatever sort) _love_ complexity. Unfortunately, engineering is the process of _removing_ everything that is not necessary to achieve the goal. Obviously that is incompatible with flagellating yourself over how superior you are for being able to build and figure out super complex systems, so we end up with a lot of bad engineering.

[dschledermann]

People love complexity. Looove it. Relish it. I have a colleague who's constantly stressed out and complains about convoluted legacy solutions. Yet he excels in designing the most complex solutions where seemingly simple tasks can grow indefinitely in lines of code. And he fights me whenever I point out that this or that could be made much simpler or that he shouldn't implement something until it's actually required. Most developers I've worked with has been like this to some degree. They love being "smart", love introducing new design patterns or frameworks or a fancy nosql technology or establishing message queue contracts or refining some foreign key constraints. And they loooove discovering "problems", that is hypothetical issues that nobody has experienced yet. I'm sick of it.

[Mooooov]

We got a new project at work. The business logic is about 120 lines of python parsing code slapping that stuff into an SQLite Database that gets packaged with a go app into a container. The business logic is essentially a few lines of SQL.

The frontend however is an Angular app that has a few thousand lines of typescript already...

[SimGunther]

"Simplicity taken to an extreme becomes elegance"
-Jon Franklin

[MatiasKiviniemi]

Previous job was maintaining a 15y+ old B2B app that had a postgres db for 20k users, ~1tb data. We had upgrade servers whenever Linux ran out of updates. For performance it was always "add index".

[h.i.sentertainments]

96% solving problems around what we built. Our frontend is in Elm, and we somehow still managed to spaghettify it. That means, excessive use of generics, message value transformers, closely coupled library and application (application specific logic in library!), and nonsensical naming. It took a month for our team to remove a field from a form.

[hamm]

Often, stack complexity is the result of hiding company politics in the codebase instead of effectively solving them in a meeting.

[JoeJoeTater]

It really bugs me when people don't differentiate between complexity and complication. (Admittedly, the distinction is kind of systems science jargon.) Complexity is when a few simple parts lead to lots of rich behavior. Complication is when you have a giant pile of exceptions. Lambda calculus is complex but uncomplicated. HTML is uncomplex but complicated.