Something about complexity, simplicity, and hope.

An idiot admires complexity, a genius admires simplicity ~ Terry A. Davis Having spent the last 7 or so years working in software development, I have developed quite a few strong feelings about this topic. I have seen mountains of distributed systems rise and fall. I have seen talented engineers shifting them around. I have seen people, how they invented new tooling to keep the ever growing pile manageable. Creating services on top of services on top of… - you get the gist. Then adding some meta-services to keep some of the more hidden ones monitored and well. I have seen Kubernetes clusters hosting a few static files. Content management systems hosting a few markdown files. Handwritten, custom registries distributing patches that should have been included in the published binary itself. I have seen them rise, and ultimately - I have seen them fall. Crushed under their own weight, collapsing and bringing down systems their stakeholders better had a backup for. When I started, I admired