This part in Rich Hickey's Simple Made Easy talk [1] had a lasting impression on me. It really drove home the point on how a build up of complexity (one of the

This part in Rich Hickey's Simple Made Easy talk [1] had a lasting impression on me. It really drove home the point on how a build up of complexity (one of the most common forms of tech debt, and one of the hardest to avoid) can eventually "kill" a project in exactly the way you described, slowly and painfully: "But I have all this speed. I'm agile. I'm fast. You know, this easy stuff is making my life good because I have a lot of speed." What kind of runner can run as fast as they possibly can from the very start of a race? [Audience reply: Sprinter] Right, only somebody who runs really short races, okay? But of course, we are programmers, and we are smarter than runners, apparently, because we know how to fix that problem, right? We just fire the starting pistol every hundred yards and call it a new sprint. ...It's my contention, based on experience, that if you ignore complexity, you will slow down. You will invariably slow down over the long haul. ...if you focus on ease, you will be able to go as fast as possible from the beginning of the race. But no matter what technology you use, or sprints or firing pistols, or whatever, the complexity will eventually kill you. It will kill you in a way that will make every sprint accomplish less. Most sprints will be about completely redoing things you've already done. And the net effect is you're not moving forward in any significant way. [1] https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hickey_Rich/SimpleMadeEasy.md https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi...