This mindset is criminally underrated in the startup/indie builder world. There's so much pressure to architect for scale you might never reach, or to use "industry standard" stacks that add enormous complexity.
I've been heads-down building a scheduling tool, and the number of times I've had to talk myself out of over-engineering is embarrassing. "Should I use Kafka for event streaming?" No. "Do I need microservices?" Probably not. "Can Postgres handle this?" Almost certainly yes.
The real skill is knowing when you've actually outgrown something vs. when you're just pattern-matching what Big Tech does. Most products never get to the scale where these distinctions matter—but they DO die from complexity-induced paralysis.
What's been your experience with that inflection point where you actually needed to graduate to more complex tooling? How did you know it was time?
This mindset is criminally underrated in the startup/indie builder world. There's so much pressure to architect for scale you might never reach, or to use "industry standard" stacks that add enormous complexity.
I've been heads-down building a scheduling tool, and the number of times I've had to talk myself out of over-engineering is embarrassing. "Should I use Kafka for event streaming?" No. "Do I need microservices?" Probably not. "Can Postgres handle this?" Almost certainly yes.
The real skill is knowing when you've actually outgrown something vs. when you're just pattern-matching what Big Tech does. Most products never get to the scale where these distinctions matter—but they DO die from complexity-induced paralysis.
What's been your experience with that inflection point where you actually needed to graduate to more complex tooling? How did you know it was time?