The best system I ever shipped is one nobody talks about. It has run for years now. It survived traffic spikes, power cuts, a datacentre migration, and several changes of management. Nobody praises it, because praising it would require remembering it exists. This, I have come to believe, is the highest state a piece of software can reach.
It took me a while to believe that, because nothing in the culture of this industry encourages it. The rewards — attention, promotions, conference talks — flow toward the new thing, the clever thing, the migration to the framework that did not exist eighteen months ago. Nobody gets applauded for the service that simply kept working. The incentives all point away from boring, and then we act surprised when nothing is.
Eventful places teach you
Working in Iraq recalibrates this quickly. The electricity is eventful. The politics are eventful. The internet, some weeks, is extremely eventful. When the environment provides this much excitement for free, you stop wanting any more of it from your own systems. A deploy should be the least interesting part of anyone’s day.
So the taste I have developed is almost embarrassingly plain. Fewer services, not more. A database you already understand over a database you would like to understand. Dependencies you could replace in an afternoon. Code that a tired person can read at two in the morning, because eventually a tired person will have to.
Boring is a discipline
None of this is the absence of skill. Anyone can make something complicated; complication is what happens by default, the way a desk gets cluttered. Simplicity is an act of ongoing refusal — of the tempting abstraction, of the speculative feature, of the resume-driven dependency. You say no a hundred times so that the system can keep saying yes quietly for years.
The unglamorous virtues again. A page that loads fast. A form that doesn’t lose its mind. A backend that doesn’t wake anyone at three in the morning. I have written that sentence before on this site, and I will probably write it again, because after all these years it is still the whole job.
Make it work. Make it stay working. Then leave it alone, and go live your eventful life somewhere else.