Most of What We Call Progress

"I've watched that excitement enough times to recognize its cycles. Years ago, a colleague was setting up Apache Spark for a modest analytics job. The dataset was small. He knew the requirements intimately. In all honesty, the complexity was completely unnecessary. I asked why. His answer was what I've heard countless times since: Because it scales. That moment stayed with me. Not because Spark was wrong, but because I realized how easily engineers, myself included, confuse capability with necessity."

"The illusion of progress often looks exactly like progress: more systems, more layers, more abstraction. It feels like forward motion until it is not. That's why I wrote a chapter arguing you can do most analytics with a few scripts and Postgres. And damn, I love Postgres. With time, you start to notice a deeper pattern. The same optimism that drives innovation also fuels waste. Every cool modern stack eventually becomes tomorrow's cautionary tale."

Most claimed progress in software is motion: new tools, frameworks, and processes that leave core problems unchanged. Engineers frequently choose technologies for capabilities they do not need, mistaking potential for necessity and applying scalable but complex solutions to modest problems. Experience shifts priorities toward pragmatic, simpler approaches such as scripts and relational databases when appropriate. Abstractions that promise freedom often add friction and long-term maintenance burdens. The real change with experience is perspective: better decision-making, collaboration, and focusing on what matters instead of accumulating layers. Optimism drives innovation but can also produce waste without discernment.

Read at Yusuf Aytas