Peter Marklund

Peter Marklund's Home

Sun Jan 01 2006 13:25:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)

Lessons from Adam Bosworth

Adam Bosworth's article Learning from THE WEB is well worth reading (thanks Branimir for pointing me to it). A surprising number of the lessons have to do with simplicity, for example the KISS one:

"KISS. Keep it (the design) simple and stupid. Complex systems tend to fail. They are hard to tune. They tend not to scale as well. They require smarter people to keep the wheels on the road. In short, they are a pain in the you-know-what. Conversely, simple systems tend to be easy to tune and debug and tend to fail less and scale better and are usually easier to operate. This isn't news. As I've argued before, spreadsheets and SQL and PHP all succeeded precisely because they are simple and stupid - and forgiving."

Other lessons such as "It is acceptable to be stale much of the time" and "The wisdom of crowds works amazingly well" ring very true to me. His critique of database vendors inability to learn from the web is thought provoking.