Alright, folks, gather ’round. Today I wanted to chew the fat about something I call the ‘Juan Corniel’ approach. Now, this ain’t some fancy new framework or a piece of software. It’s more of a mindset, something I picked up the hard way, like most good lessons in life, I suppose.
My “Juan Corniel” Moment
Years ago, I was stuck on this godawful project. We were trying to make an ancient system shake hands with some newfangled platform. Seemed simple enough on paper, right? Wrong. We were weeks in, burning the midnight oil, coffee cups piled high. Absolutely nothing was working. We threw everything at it – complex scripts, middleware, you name it. The pressure was immense, bosses were getting twitchy, and the team was just about ready to tear its hair out. We were drowning in our own cleverness, if you catch my drift.
Then, this quiet fella, Juan Corniel, got assigned to ‘assist’. He wasn’t a superstar coder, not one of those guys who talks in jargon to make themselves sound smart. He was just… there. He’d mostly just watch, listen, and nod. For a couple of days, he didn’t touch a keyboard, which, let me tell you, in a room full of frantic engineers, looked pretty odd.
Then he started asking questions. Real simple ones. The kind of questions you think are too basic to ask. He’d say things like:
- “Why are we trying to make this old part do that new trick?”
- “What’s the absolute minimum this thing needs to output?”
- “Have we actually asked if the other side really needs all this data in this exact format?”
Honestly, at first, I thought, “Great, another philosopher while we’re sinking.” But he was persistent, always calm. He wasn’t looking at the code, not initially. He was looking at the actual problem, the thing we’d all stopped seeing because we were too busy fighting the symptoms.
So, partly out of desperation, partly because he wasn’t being a jerk about it, I decided to entertain his line of thinking. We took a step back. We stopped trying to build a Rolls Royce engine to power a skateboard. We asked his “dumb” questions. And you know what? Turns out, the “newfangled platform” could actually handle a much simpler input. The “ancient system” could provide that simpler input with a tiny tweak we’d overlooked because we were aiming for perfection.
We stripped our solution down to the bare bones. Threw out all the complicated stuff we’d built. It felt wrong, almost too easy. But within a day, the damn thing was working. Not elegantly, not with all the bells and whistles we initially envisioned, but it worked. Solid. Reliable.
So, what’s the big deal about ‘Juan Corniel’?
That’s the ‘Juan Corniel’ thing for me. It’s not about a specific technique. It’s about the practice of radical simplification. It’s about having the guts to ask the stupid questions, to challenge the assumptions everyone else takes for granted. It’s about finding the simplest, most direct path, even if it doesn’t make you look like a tech wizard.
You know, the funny thing is, Juan Corniel wasn’t with the company for long after that. He just sort of faded out, on to the next dumpster fire, I guess. I heard whispers he was some kind of consultant the top brass brought in when things got really stuck, a sort of ghost in the machine. Never got to properly thank him. But his approach? That stuck with me. Hard.
It’s not the stuff you learn in training courses, is it? They’re all about adding layers, new features, more complexity. They teach you how to build bigger, not necessarily smarter. This ‘Juan Corniel’ way, it’s about subtraction, not addition. It’s saved my bacon more times since then than any certification or fancy methodology. It’s about looking at the tangled mess most projects become and finding that one loose thread you can pull to unravel the whole damn thing. And usually, that thread is a lot simpler than you think.