Lessons learned from the industry

If you buy a Lamborghini, you have to maintain the Lamborghini

I have a personal philosophy of keeping things simple, instead of overcomplicating things that will require re-learning what the code does! And not to mention the amount of time in maintenance of complicated code when dependent things break. In my 10+ years of working in various large tech companies including Google, Qualcomm, Open Text, and the Canadian Government, I learned some truly enlightening, intuitive as well as contradictory things. As you might expect, projects evolve from their infancy and look like this:

... and eventually reaching a state where in 5-10+ years of development time, 100s of engineers are involved to maintain a large-scale unsustainable solution; growing uncontrollably from various having to meet targets, feature releases, and aim for new goals of the organization. In the figure below, a trireme has 3 rows of rowers on each side, which can bring the total crew count to 150-200 that are actively involved in running this ship. Just imagine.

As the project grows further, it gets more and more difficult to scale up the modules. Moreover, the concerned person or the tech lead who has a say in the project timeline has to step up and initiate a cleanup of the code, also called the tech debt. One person cannot do this which further warrants the help of another entire team that becomes responsible for the tools and deployment of the software going forward. Now to keep things running smoothly in a trireme, what if I said that we will need to create a large floating platform that's connected to the ship by several cables and ladders so that they help organize the daily operations?

If there isn't already a consecutive delivery due just after a major delivery that got done from a 10-month grind, the person leading the team has to step back and look for slack in the project timeline where this tech debt can be paid off as fully as possible. And oftentimes in the tech sector, back-to-back projects are a thing... so remember, don't overcomplicate stuff or else if you buy a Lamborghini, you have to maintain the Lamborghini

In a well-developed project the evolution of a project as it matures has automated testing, regression toolchain, and a thorough validation pipeline, CI/CD, etc. (in my opinion 👽). Yes, it does look super simple, and yet it can be complex the more a developer in your team digs deeper, but the "feeling" is never that it's complicated. It is counter-intuitive.