I grew up in rural Newfoundland; we built things to last, wharves, bridges, houses, mostly by sweat and hard work. And we didn’t have the luxury, or space to buy a kit to build the framework, or have to wait for patches for it from a third party somewhere. You built it once, you built it solid, and you didn’t overcomplicate it, but used lots of nails.

Putting on my hypocrite hat here, modern development, the web in particular, but backend too, has largely lost that plot. We’ve turned sites, apps, apis—into bloated, buggy marinas when all we wanted was a place to shelter a boat, with many features we’ll never use, but need to maintain. We trade efficiency for “convenience,” piling on layers until nobody actually knows how anything under the hood works anymore. We’ve replaced robust engineering with “agile” guessing.

Of course, as noted, I’m a total hypocrite. While I’m sitting here pining for simplicity (and the fjords, Monty Python reference there) and criticizing the bloat, I’m using React Native and API Frameworks (Fast API, Django) to build apps and the things that power them like everyone else.

I suppose even someone who values simplicity eventually caves to the convenience of the very tools they complain about.