The Power in Simplicity

Make it work. Make it right. Make it fast. – Kent Beck

While in life proudest of us want to see certain changes, and often it comes to a reality that such changes can be made only by us (be the change you want to see in the world…), the presented problems can be solved in the most available and efficient way possible - in a simple way.

1. Understand the problem.
2. Do the simplest thing that could possibly work.
3. Simplest thing often means to not write any code at all.
4. Simplest thing is often straightforward and stupid.
5. Stick to the reality. Focus more on the actual problem rather than artifically created frame around that problem.
6. Don’t mind performance unless it’s an issue.
7. Don’t address ethereal issues of the tomorrow. We’re bad at predicting future anyway, so why bother?
8. Avoid complexity as much as you can. Choose the tools just of the size and efficiency to solve the problem. Which often means the most basic ones.
9. If you’re stuck, go rest.

I believe that every problem has a simple solution. It’s not obvious at first, and may require a lot of iteration to find it, but it is there. Often, such simple solution is not the cleanest, is not the “best practice”, but it does work, it follows the right intentions, and it can be done as fast as possible.

At the end of the day noone cares how hard you’ve worked, only the final output matters. End user of the product won’t even notice all the complexity we create underneath the project, unless it breaks his experience (and on complex products it often does!). End user only wants certain things to happen, certain problems to be solved, in the most straightforward, cheapest, fastest way. So why should we bother about everything else?

• The most important talk on programming by Jonathan Blow