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Do the simplest thing that could possibly work
When designing software systems, do the simplest thing that could possibly work. It’s surprising how far you can take this piece of advice. I genuinely think…
You can tell you’re in the presence of great software design because you start having thoughts like “oh, I didn’t realise the problem was that easy” or “oh nice, you don’t actually have to do anything difficult”. Unicorn is great software design, because it delivers all the most important guarantees in a web server (request isolation, horizontal scaling, crash recovery) by leaning on Unix primitives. A certain type of engineer is now screaming to themselves “but in-memory rate limiting won’t scale!” Doing the simplest thing that could possibly work will emphatically not deliver the most web-scale system.
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