Comment by throwaway5752
7 hours ago
"Premature optimization is the root of all evil"
Decades in, this is the worst of all of them. Misused by laziness or malice, and nowhere near specific enough.
The graveyard of companies boxed in by past poor decisions is sprawling. And the people that made those early poor decisions bounce around field talking about their "successful track record" of globally poor and locally good architectural decisions that others have had to clean up.
It touches on a real problem, though, but it should be stricken form the record and replaced with a much better principle. "Design to the problem you have today and the problems you have in 6 months if you succeed. Don't design to the problems you'll have have next year if it means you won't succeed in 6 months" doesn't roll off the tongue.
On your last bit, I definitely agree... personally I've leaned more and more into KISS above all else... simple things that are easy to replace are easily replaced only when you need to. Similarly, I also tend to push for initial implementations of many/most things in a scripted language first, mostly for flexibility/simplicity to get a process "right" before worrying about a lot of other things.
One thing that came out of the no-sql/new-sql trends in the past decade and a half is that joins are the enemy of performance at scale. It really helps to know and compromise on db normalization in ways such as leaning on JSON/XML for non-critical column data as opposed to 1:1/children/joins a lot of the time. For that matter, pure performance and vertical scale have shifted a lot of options back from the brink of micro service death by a million paper cuts processes.