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by harpiaharpyja 1205 days ago
The sentiment is nice but ceases to be useful when people have trouble distinguishing what could possibly work from what appears to work for a bit and then breaks down horribly.

And it's not really about the fallibility of people. Often in engineering you can be designing in a space with a lot of unknowns, that simply can't be resolved without building out a bit to explore the space more. In such case some level of future proofing is warranted.

I'm kind of suspicious of adages like these that assume perfect information.

3 comments

I always look at adages like these as something to keep in mind for the future. We can choose the simplest thing now and make it easy to swap it out for the more correct and more time-consuming thing later.

Sometimes the difficulty in distinguishing what the simplest thing could be comes from being in a group setting where people have equal say in the matter.

I think everyone has personal anecdotes to support the idea of doing the simplest thing suitable for that moment. But how to convince the group? I'm not sure, I don't always succeed.

A situation where I did do just the simplest thing is when I was asked to use project management software and a build server for a very early stage project with only myself as a developer. I declined. Instead I made a script to compile and package everything and emailed that to the others. We used an instant messenger for communication. It worked great for the early stage when the focus is on the MVP, though the project didn't go anywhere due to business reasons.

It will always still be possible to use the project management software and build server later. But it wasn't necessary at the very start.

Yeah sometimes you have to do the complicated thing, the saying "you can't build a ladder to the moon" comes to mind

I do think that many people make the wrong tradeoff in terms of complexity to features ratio though.

That is, I think, why a lot of people add "that can possibly work"
Yes exactly. The simplest thing that "works" is string and duck tape.