The Courage of the Obvious Answer
There’s a moment in every hard problem where someone suggests the simple thing. Restart the service. Use a spreadsheet. Send an email instead of building a notification system. Just ask them. And the room goes quiet for a second, because the simple thing feels too easy — like it can’t possibly be right, because if it were, why did we spend three hours talking about it? So you don’t do the simple thing. You build the elegant thing. The clever thing. The thing that handles seventeen edge cases, four of which have never happened and two of which can’t. And six weeks later, you’re debugging it at midnight, and somewhere in the back of your mind a small voice whispers: we could have just restarted the service. ...