What's actually Hard in Software

The hardest thing to deal with in software is complexity.

Human beings always want better, bigger, newer and the latest thing. Sometimes, in the process, we forget that something working is all that’s required.

I’m saying this from experience. I’ve worked on countless projects, and in many of them, I’ve eventually had to strip away parts that were simply too complex for the problem we were trying to solve. From the backend to minor details in the UI.

A good example is Soma Stories.

When I started building the platform around September last year, my stack looked like this:

1. Flask - Push Notifs, Digest Emails, Recommendation Engine
2. Flutter - Android and iOS App
3. Redis - Message Broker
4. PostgreSQL - DB: Stories, Books, etc
5. MongoDB - Client DB. Believe it or not, I was syncing to Postgres on every write 😅
6. BullMQ - Background job
7. Docker - Containerization, prod
8. Express - Client API
9. Next.js - Web Client, Admin Dashboard

Github Actions - CI/CD