Stop looking for complex solutions.

There are no points for coming up with a complex solution to a problem.

Don’t overcomplicate stuff, just because the easy thing doesn’t feel right to you.

See if the obvious solution works. See if it is already a solved problem. See if you can take help from someone else.

Many times people overcomplicate issues because the simple option doesn’t feel right or impressive to them. They think the harder solution must be better. But that’s not true at all.

I was talking to a dev yesterday, and they asked for a library that can help them with an animation. They got a brief to create cool looking, aurora borealis like animation for a landing page, to play in the background. They asked which animation library can do the trick easily.

They have been at it with a library (d3.js), and was asking if Unity, or some other game development SDK can help them with it.

They had an example site as well. But, it ran a video of the animation. They felt it’s not good enough, and had spent a full 3 weeks on trying to figure it out! When I probed about the issues with a video, they said “it felt too simple for production”.

Similarly, at work, we were working on a state management system for a client. Client thought we needed some elaborate AI setup to work on it. They had allocated huge budget for the AI bit. After making the state machine, we were able to complete it in 39 lines of Ruby code.

Client’s team wasn’t convinced though, they felt it’ll break under edge cases. Rigorous QA testing showed them that it was indeed safe, and worked better.

Same thing with people complicating their blogging setup, their development environment, their tech stack (why do you need React for a static page? Why?).

People love to complicate things. They are not comfortable with the solution that is easier to implement.

You had to take complicated routes in school to score marks. So now, taking the easy or simple path feels like cheating.

But there are no points for complicating things in the real world.

So please, try out the easy solution first, and don’t change it until it starts breaking.

simple solution Image taken from this tweet.