I’m faced with a lot of what is hip and bleeding-edge in IT in my professional work every day. And for some time now, i had this weird, subtle feeling that something is “off”. Things are supposed to be easy to work with and get a lot of shit done. But it doesn’t feel like it. All those supposed easy interfaces to get stuff done are putting a ton of mental load on you, even for tasks which should be very simple. And when something goes sideways there are suddenly a lot of flaming hoops to jump through to actually get to the point of debugging something.
And recently i realized my problem with all of this: none of those tools are simple anymore.
The tech stack which is required to run a stupid “hello world” on a given Kubernetes cluster is just gigantic. The amount of moving parts involved here are is staggering. And Kubernetes is just an example. It is the same nearly everywhere. On the way to “ease of use”, things have become unbelievably complicated under the hood. Another classic example is systemd on my beloved Linux. While i do understand some of the initial motives, it has grown into a gigantic pile of interwoven moving parts which are hard to really understand well. Sure, some things might be easier to do with it, but it definitly isn’t as simple as oldschool rc-scripts. Those have their problems, but they’re easier to understand.
There is (supposedly) easy to use. And there is easy to understand. I mean really understand how a given thing works. This is only possible if something is relatively simple.
Simplicity is hard to achieve. It is way easier to just throw stuff together until it kinda works in some way. But what is lost with that approach is actually understanding what the fuck is happening. Things become unmaintenable very fast. And this is not only a problem in IT. It is everywhere in this modern, “civilized” world we live in.
Can it be nice to stream music over the internet on your phone while it’s connected to your cars stereo via Bluetooth? Sure. Until you drive briefly through a narrow valley. Or the streaming app crashes/malfunctions for whatever reason. Or Bluetooth is acting up. Putting some kind of physical media (tape, CD, Minidisc…) into a dedicated device has always worked more reliably for me. And i don’t have to fucking re-pair the thing or wait a minute until it decides to maybe finally connect. Put the media in, it gets played. It’s simpler.
Or modern roadbikes. They tend to come with fully electronic shifting nowadays, most even wireless. It shifts very precise and very fast, which is great. Until you forget to charge the battery. One of the great things about bikes in general is, that they’re very simple machines. I honestly don’t understand why it is necessary to introduce complexity here. Cable-based shifting might need a tiny bit of maintenance from time to time. But it is very simple and probably everybody can do it themself.
This topic is bothering me for a while now and i’ll continue to spend time to think and research about this in general.