[zbentley]

> We had serious constraints that would need elegant solutions.

In the era of abundant hardware resources, I like to think that this sense of craftsmanship hasn't been abandoned, but rather transmuted--transmuted into the ability to make things as readable, accessible, and maintainable as possible.

The Redis, Phantom (Thrift proxy), Kafka, and PostgreSQL codebases are regularly things I consult as role models in the design of clean, pragmatic code.

The explosion of technologies since the elegance-by-necessity-of-optimization era does not necessarily mean that the capability of engineers has declined.