Eventually, all software becomes complex. Projects that run entirely in the command line are rare, and even simple little web applications seem to get more involved once you actually want to run them somewhere other than localhost. Sure you have your executable package, but there’s also likely to be a bunch of things that don’t exist on your local machine, like load balancing, multiple instances, probably some sort of metrics agent running alongside the code, likely some sort of caching – the list goes on. Running code being used by others always gets more complex than something just used by you, as your code evolves to make sure no matter what people do the application doesn’t crash, error out, or get its data into an invalid state. What’s important is acknowledging that software naturally gains complexity as it moves from “local project” to “running in production,” and make sure we’re paying attention to where we’re adding this complexity, and why it’s there.
Dec 312023