The Peak of Complexity: A Developer’s Journey

In our team, we do it all—from ideation to development, testing, production, and monitoring. We’re pretty DevOps. While we work within a certain technological box (approved tech stack, platforms, and some standards), inside that box, we have a lot of creative freedom.

Over time, I’ve noticed a pattern when developing new features and services. It usually goes like this:

1. We get a request and confidently say, “Yep, this looks simple enough. We can do it.”
2. We start working on it.
3. Things we hadn’t anticipated come flying in from every direction.
4. Complexity creeps in. We keep adding more and more things we hadn’t thought of.
5. We finally finish the implementation… but it’s big, bulky, overcomplicated mess.
6. BUT—it works, and it’s well-tested.
7. Over time, as we gain better insights, we start coming up with new, better ideas. “Wait a second, couldn’t we simplify this?”
8. We begin refactoring, cleaning, moving things around, removing many unnecessary parts.
9. The solution gradually becomes smaller, cleaner, simpler.
10. Eventually, we land on an elegant implementation—far from the initial complexity, but also far from our very first, naive plan.

At that point, that final solution we end up with, looks so obvious! And then the self-doubt and self-deprecation questions start pouring in:

?? Why didn’t we do it this way from the start?!

?? How could I not have seen this before?

?? Am I an idiot?!

Enter: Brian Goetz at #JFokus

A few days ago, Brian Goetz (THE Brian Goetz) shared a slide describing the process behind developing the new Project Valhalla.

He called it the Peak of Complexity—and it described exactly what we were going through as developers every single times!!

?? First, the optimism: “This will be easy.”

?? Then, the struggle: “Who signed us up for this?!”

?? The peak of complexity: "Well... it works."

?? The collapse: We start simplifying.

?? The final realization: “That’s so obvious! Why did this take years?”

Yes, the problems they’re solving are on a whole different level of complexity than ours. But then again, Brian Goetz is magnitudes smarter than us—so it kind of cancels out. ??

The Takeaway

We all go through this. It’s just how software development works. You don’t fully understand the simplest solution until you’ve lived through the complexity.

At least, that’s what I tell others. But me? I’ll still blame myself for not coming up with the final solution earlier… at least for a little while longer, while I let this sink in. ??