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建立時間： 2026-03-24 來源： https://www.seangoedecke.com/the-simplest-thing-that-could-possibly-work/
Summary
Sean Goedecke argues that “do the simplest thing that could possibly work” should be the supreme software design principle, above SOLID, DRY, or scalability concerns. Real simplicity isn’t the first hack that comes to mind — it requires understanding the system deeply and finding the fewest moving pieces that genuinely solves the problem. The post uses in-memory vs. Redis rate limiting as a concrete example throughout.
Sean Goedecke 主張「做最簡單可行的事情」應是最高軟體設計原則，凌駕於 SOLID、DRY 或可擴展性考慮。真正的簡單不是第一個想到的 hack，而是需要深入理解系統後找到能解決問題的最少活動部件。
Key Points
- Great design looks underwhelming — “oh, I didn’t realize the problem was that easy”
- Hacks are NOT simple — they ADD complexity (things you always have to remember); the proper fix is often simpler
- Tiebreaker for simplicity: stable systems are simpler — in-memory rate limiting beats Redis if requirements allow (Redis needs deployment, monitoring, maintenance)
- Premature scalability is a cardinal sin: you can’t predict bottlenecks, and decoupled services make features harder to implement
- This approach elevates YAGNI to the ultimate design principle: above scalability, above “good patterns”
Insights
The reframing of hacks as “not simple but easy to think of” is the essay’s sharpest insight. It shifts the critique of “quick fixes” from a moral failure (laziness) to a cognitive one (not thinking hard enough to find the actual simple solution). The stability tiebreaker — “which state will require less ongoing work if requirements don’t change?” — is a practical decision heuristic that cuts through philosophical debates about what “simple” means.
Connections
Raw Excerpt
The main reason to not try [premature scalability] is that it doesn’t work. In my experience, for any non-trivial codebase, you can’t anticipate how it will behave at several orders of magnitude more traffic, because you don’t know ahead of time where all the bottlenecks are going to be.