Minimalism

After twenty years in web development, I’ve realized that the most dangerous thing in our industry isn’t a security vulnerability or a system outage—it’s creeping complexity. We are conditioned to believe that a more sophisticated setup equals a more professional output. We stack layers of abstraction until we can no longer see the foundation of our own applications.

I spent the first decade of my career as a “maximalist.” I wanted the flashiest IDE, the most complex build pipelines, and the latest alpha-version frameworks. But eventually, the weight of that tooling became a burden. I was spending 40% of my time fighting my environment rather than shipping code.

Oftentimes, when you buy a new PC, it comes preloaded with applications. Some of them are essential, like an anti-virus, and some of them are not. Over the years I’ve come to realize that the responsiveness of your device (it doesn’t necessarily have to be a computer, it can be a mobile phone or a tablet, too) depends on how many applications you have installed. This digital minimalism approach to performance optimization is especially true for mobile devices, where applications are often started at boot and remain in the memory even if they are not used, draining battery power.

My general rule is to always ask myself if I am really going to use the app I am about to install very often or just occasionally. If the answer is: “No, I don’t really need this app.”, I don’t install it no matter how great the hype is over it.