My Little Adventure with ‘Simplício’
Alright, so folks sometimes ask me about this ‘simplício’ thing I’ve been tinkering with. It’s not some grand philosophy, not really. It’s more like… a breath of fresh air I desperately needed. You see, before I stumbled into trying to make things simple, I was drowning in complexity. Seriously.
I remember this one place I worked. Oh boy. You wanna talk about a mess? We had systems built on top of systems. Patches on patches. Nobody knew how half of it actually worked anymore. It was like a digital leaning tower of Pisa, just waiting for a stiff breeze. Trying to fix a tiny bug? That was a week-long expedition into the jungle of forgotten code, armed with nothing but a rusty debugger and a lot of caffeine. They called it ‘robust’ and ‘enterprise-grade’. I called it a nightmare.
- Every small change took forever.
- Meetings about meetings to discuss changes.
- And the documentation? Hah! More like ancient scrolls, half myths, half warnings.
So, one day, I just… had enough. I was staring at this ridiculously complicated diagram for a feature that probably five people would use, and I thought, “There has to be a better way than this madness.” That’s when the idea for my own little project, the one I mentally nicknamed ‘simplício’, started to form. It wasn’t about building the next big thing. It was about proving to myself that not everything needed to be a Gordian knot.
The ‘Simplício’ Experiment Kicks Off
So, I decided to build something small. Something tiny, almost trivial. A little utility, just for myself, to solve one very specific, very simple problem I had. And I gave myself some rules. Strict rules, mind you.
- Rule #1: Use the simplest tools possible. No fancy frameworks unless absolutely, positively necessary.
- Rule #2: If a piece of code looked clever, it was probably too complicated. Rewrite it.
- Rule #3: It had to do one thing, and do it well. No feature creep. None.
I started coding. Just me, a basic text editor, and a clear goal. It felt… weirdly liberating. I wasn’t fighting with layers of abstraction. I wasn’t trying to appease some architectural review board that worshipped complexity. I just wrote code that did what it needed to do. Line by line. If I got stuck, I’d take a walk, simplify the problem in my head, then come back and try again. No pulling my hair out over obscure error messages from a black box system.
The hardest part? Resisting the urge to add stuff. You know that little voice that says, “Oh, but it would be cool if it also did THIS!” I had to shut that voice down. Hard. Because that’s how the monsters are born, right? One ‘cool feature’ at a time, until you’ve got another behemoth on your hands.
What Came Out of It?
And you know what? After a bit, my little ‘simplício’ project was done. It wasn’t flashy. It wouldn’t win any awards for innovation. But it worked. Perfectly. It did its one job, reliably, every single time. And it was so easy to understand, I could probably explain the whole thing in five minutes. A stark contrast to the behemoths I was used to wrestling with.
It taught me something important. Simplicity isn’t about being lazy or unsophisticated. Heck no. It’s actually damn hard to achieve. It takes discipline. It takes courage to say “no” to more features, more layers, more everything. But the payoff? Code that’s understandable, maintainable, and dare I say, even a little bit joyful to work with.
Now, whenever I see folks bragging about how their system has a million moving parts and requires a PhD to deploy a button, I just chuckle to myself. They can have their complexity. I’ll be over here, trying to keep things ‘simplício’. It might not make me rich or famous, but it sure saves me a lot of headaches. And honestly, isn’t that worth something?