{"slug": "stop-building-space-shuttles-when-all-you-need-is-a-bicycle", "title": "Stop Building Space Shuttles When All You Need Is a Bicycle", "summary": "The article criticizes the trend of overengineering in software development, where developers choose complex tools and architectures (like microservices) for simple projects, often driven by \"Resume-Driven Development\" rather than actual project needs. It advocates for a return to simple, well-structured monolithic applications using straightforward tools, arguing that this approach improves maintainability and velocity for most projects, such as MVPs or internal tools. The author emphasizes that architecture should prioritize delivering user value over personal ego or scalability for its own sake.", "body_md": "We’ve all been there. You join a new project, excited to look at the codebase. It's a simple application—maybe a Todo app, a simple blog, or a feedback collector.\nYou open the repository, expecting a clean, straightforward structure. Instead, you find:\nnpm run dev\n.All of this... for an application that gets 50 users a day.\nWelcome to the era of Overengineering.\nAs developers, we suffer from what I call \"Resume-Driven Development\" (RDD). We don't choose tools based on what the project needs today; we choose tools based on what looks cool on our LinkedIn profile or what Netflix uses to handle billions of requests.\nWe became so obsessed with scalability that we forgot about maintainability and velocity.\nIf it takes a junior developer three days just to set up the local environment and understand how a single HTTP request routes through twenty layers of architecture, your system isn't \"advanced.\" It's broken.\nThere is a silent counter-movement happening right now. Senior developers who have tasted the pain of managing distributed transactions and network latency in tiny microservices are screaming: Go back to the monolith!\nBuilding a \"boring\", well-structured monolithic application using simple tools (like a clean Fastify/Node.js setup, standard relational databases, and straightforward code) gives you something a distributed system can't:\nDon't get me wrong. If you are building the next Uber, Netflix, or Amazon, yes—bring on the microservices, Kafka, and complex caching layers. You earned that complexity.\nBut if you are starting an MVP, testing a product, or building a standard internal tool, keep it stupidly simple (KISS). Use a reliable SQLite or Postgres database, write clean functions, validate your data with Zod, protect your endpoints with a simple Rate Limiter, and get things done.\nArchitecture shouldn't be a monument to your ego. It should be a tool to deliver value to the user.\nWhat is the worst case of overengineering you have ever witnessed (or accidentally built) in your career? Are we, as a community, making coding harder than it needs to be?\nDrop your horror stories in the comments below! 🛰️👇", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/stop-building-space-shuttles-when-all-you-need-is-a-bicycle", "canonical_source": "https://dev.to/renato_silva_71eef0fc385f/stop-building-space-shuttles-when-all-you-need-is-a-bicycle-7c2", "published_at": "2026-05-22 19:18:14+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-05-22 19:34:18.585140+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["developer-tools", "startups", "enterprise-software"], "entities": ["Netflix", "Fastify", "Node.js", "LinkedIn", "Uber", "Amazon", "Kafka"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/stop-building-space-shuttles-when-all-you-need-is-a-bicycle", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/stop-building-space-shuttles-when-all-you-need-is-a-bicycle.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/stop-building-space-shuttles-when-all-you-need-is-a-bicycle.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/stop-building-space-shuttles-when-all-you-need-is-a-bicycle.jsonld"}}