[mactavish88]

> A lot of engineers design by trying to think of the “ideal” system: something well-factored, near-infinitely scalable, elegantly distributed, and so on.

> Instead, spend that time understanding the current system deeply, then do the simplest thing that could possibly work.

I'd argue that a fair amount of the former results in the ability to do the latter.

There's a substantial amount of wisdom that goes into designing "simple" systems (simple to understand when reading the code). Just as there's a substantial amount of wisdom that goes into making "simple" changes to those systems.