A case study from 5 years of tech audits
published on 2022/06/02
Simple Outperformed Smart. As a self-admitted elitist, it pains me to say this, but it’s true: the startups we audited that are now doing the best usually had an almost brazenly ‘Keep It Simple’ approach to engineering. Cleverness for cleverness sake was abhorred. On the flip side, the companies where we were like ”woah, these folks are smart as hell” for the most part kind of faded. Generally, the major foot-gun (which I talk about more in a previous post on foot-guns) that got a lot of places in trouble was the premature move to microservices, architectures that relied on distributed computing, and messaging-heavy designs.
We identify this a lot. We have been in business since 2003 and we have maintained the systems that we built for this long. We have seen what works and what doesn't. Simplicity is the way.