How boring should your team's codebases be
Every time this topic comes up, it reminds me of a web app I wrote back around 2007 that was deployed to a over 2000 locations. I deliberately used &quot;boring&quot; technologies. The entire front-end used under 100 lines of JavaScript. The backend was simply SQL Server, and the queries were written in SQL instead of some ORM. The output was just HTML. No special tooling was used, no &quot;minification&quot; or &quot;tree shaking&quot;, or any such thing. Just hit the build button and &quot;copy to deploy&quot;.<p>For about a decade I used to turn up to that customer annually for &quot;maintenance&quot;, which primarily involved importing some CSVs that changed every year, and also updating the logo images and icons to match any rebrands.<p>In that time the system had two million users, went through 4 OS upgrades, 3 database upgrades, and went through the 32-bit to 64-bit upgrade also. The underlying runtime had 3 or 4 major updates, depending on how you count it.<p>Zero outages, no problems, only the occasional performance regression that could be fixed by poking the database statistics to get things back in their groove.<p>The problem was...<p>You see, all of the above was a <i>problem</i>, because it didn&#x27;t keep me employed. I was not the &quot;hero&quot; for saving the day. Entire teams of people weren&#x27;t involved. There was no visibility at the senior management level. Nobody got scared, or had to throw money at it, or hire consultants to review it.<p>So it had to go.<p>It was replaced by a system that cost about 500x as much (a 9-digit sum), got rolled back for failing to meet requirements, and then got additional funding and was eventually forced upon its hapless users.<p>That, apparently, was doing things &quot;properly&quot;. That got everybody involved. Everyone got their beak wet. All the way up to government ministers and their lobbyists. Multiple consultancies were engaged. Reports. Audits. Reviews.<p>This is why we can&#x27;t have simplicity: because it doesn&#x27;t scale.