🧠 The Silent Trap of the Developer Who "Already Knows a Lot"
There comes a point in almost every developer's life when the problem stops being technical… and starts being mental.
You're no longer struggling with how to write a loop, how to connect to a database, or how to spin up a server. You've already mastered that. Now the enemy is something else—much more uncomfortable:
Making decisions.
And here's the part nobody explains to you:
the decisions that make a product work in the real world don't always match the decisions that make the code look elegant, modern, or intellectually satisfying.
This post is about that transition.
About stopping being just someone who writes code… and becoming someone who builds things that truly matter.
And yes, it hurts a little.
🎯 Choosing What's Best for the Business (Even If It's Not the Most Fun to Build)
There's a question that carries more weight than any bug:
"Does anyone actually need this feature I want to build?"
Because let's be honest, we've all had:
- That feature that sounds awesome.
- That advanced dashboard with a thousand filters.
- That complex system that “would look epic”.
… but that nobody asked for. Nobody validated. Nobody is waiting for.
Learning to say:
"This is great, but it's not what delivers the most value right now"
is one of the biggest leaps in maturity as a developer.
It's not about killing your creativity.
It's about putting it in service of real impact, not technical ego.
🧩 The Addiction to Overcomplicating Everything (hello, microservices too early)
At some point we discover:
microservices, Kubernetes, event-driven architectures, CQRS… and we feel an almost spiritual need to use them all.
The problem is when you do it in a project that hasn't even proven it needs to scale yet.
Then beautiful things start happening, like:
- Logs scattered across 5 services.
- Debug sessions where you don't even know where to begin.
- Crossed dependencies worthy of a soap opera.
- “That's not failing here, it must be another service.”
Spoiler:
Sometimes all you need is a well-organized monolith and a database to validate your idea.
Scaling is fine.
Scaling without a real need is overengineering in a fancy suit.
🧱 "But this framework handles 200k requests per second…"
Awesome.
Your API gets 18.
So many times we choose technology based on extreme benchmarks, when the real problem is somewhere else:
- Queries without indexes.
- N+1 queries.
- Fetching 10,000 rows when you only needed 20.
- No caching at all.
- Nonexistent pagination.
Switching frameworks won't fix a query that takes 2 seconds because you're pulling half the database.
Most slow APIs don't fail because of the router.
They fail because of poorly thought-out data.
🐳 Sometimes a docker compose up Is Enough
Not every project needs:
- A distributed cluster
- Autoscaling
- A service mesh
- 4 environments per microservice
Sometimes you just need:
- A backend
- A database
- A Redis instance
And for everything to start up without drama.
Simple = understandable.
Understandable = maintainable.
Maintainable = fewer fires at 2 AM.
Simplicity is not mediocrity.
Many times, it's experience speaking.
🧨 The Fake Microservice: The Distributed Monolith
This classic one hurts because many of us have been there.
"We have microservices"
…but they all use the same database.
Result:
- A change in one table breaks half the system.
- Everything depends on everything.
- Nobody can deploy without coordinating with half the team.
That's not microservices.
That's a monolith with network problems.
If you're going to split things, split them for real:
- Clear boundaries.
- Data independence.
- Communication through events or well-defined APIs.
- Fault tolerance between modules.
If one service goes down and takes the whole system with it… it wasn't really independent to begin with.
🚀 The Obsession with Perfect Code (and the Feature No One Used)
We've all spent hours:
- Renaming variables.
- Reorganizing folders.
- Doing refactors "just because."
- Improving an architecture nobody else sees.
Meanwhile, the feature:
- Hasn't been validated.
- Nobody asked for it.
- Nobody uses it.
Validate first.
Then make it beautiful.
Because refactoring something that's actually used is an investment.
Perfecting something nobody wants is… modern art.
🧪 Tests: Early Pain That Saves Eternal Suffering
Adding tests to an already massive project is like trying to install seat belts after the crash.
Yes, writing tests from the beginning takes time.
But adding tests when the system is already big, fragile, and full of patches… that's real pain.
It's always better than:
- Breaking something without realizing it.
- Being afraid to refactor.
- Not knowing whether your change broke something else.
Tests aren't there to impress with coverage.
They're there to give you confidence as the codebase grows.
… confidence to change things without fear.
🤖 Don't Marry a Technology (or a Tech Religion)
We all have a:
- Favorite language.
- Favorite framework.
- Favorite stack.
And that's fine.
What's dangerous is thinking that's the solution to everything.
Sometimes we use a technology because:
"It's the best thing in the world"
But in reality: It's the most complex thing in the world for a simple problem.
Maybe for that specific problem…
it's like killing a fly with a missile.
It's not black and white.
It's context.
Choosing well isn't about following trends.
It's about understanding:
What I need, what I know how to use, and what lets me move forward without sinking.
Code Less, Decide Better
Over time, you come to understand something key:
Being a good developer isn't just about knowing how to build complex things.
It's about knowing when NOT to build them.
Technical maturity isn't reflected in how many tools you use, but in how many problems you avoid creating.
Sometimes growth isn't about adding more layers… it's about removing the ones that were never needed.
And that, even if it doesn't always look spectacular on GitHub, is what truly builds products that last.