Simplicity

Catching up

It turns out that having a day job can play havoc with your blogging activities. I’m posting a round-up of recent activities, in no particular order, with the intention of expanding on each of these topics in the coming weeks. But we all know what happens to intentions. This is mostly a brain dump to make me feel guilty enough to write some of it up, so feel free to skip it if you’re busy.

How simple is too simple?

4 mins
This question came up at the recent Expo-C conference, when presenter Michael Stal talked about designing services to be “as simple as possible but no simpler”. Kent Beck advises us to do “the simplest thing that could possibly work”, but this is often mistaken for “the first thing I could possibly think of” or even “the only thing I know” (also known as the Golden Hammer antipattern). We picked up the topic as an open space session later that day.