KISS Beats Accidental Complexity

Our friends at Sanvira published a blog post about a Django project they shipped five years ago, which is still running today without change, hand holding or application server restart. I really enjoy stories like this. Small, well engineered monoliths, just sitting there doing their job and not randomly breaking.

While this sounds trivial it is not – and it is by far not the standard. I have seen enough systems fall apart for random reasons. Missing database indexes being on top of the list.

The other thing that stands out to me are the frameworks and libraries. You can start nearly any web project with the exact same components today. (Ignoring VueJS - I reserve the right to not have an opinion on technologies and in domains I am not involved in.) APIs might have changed a bit. Functionality was added and bugs have been fixed. But they are all still around, doing well and have proven to be production ready. Compare that to ecosystems which reinvent package management every other week.