After 14 Years of Programming, Complexity Is Still the Enemy
After 14 years of shipping software, Piglei distills eight lessons on why programming stays hard. His central claims: good code remains a low-probability event even inside large companies serving millions of users; the ideal programming experience resembles solving LeetCode problems — separated concerns, fast precise feedback, near-zero cost of mistakes — and teams should chase that feeling through modularity, automated tests and shorter feedback loops; and the real enemy is not the product manager who keeps changing requirements but compounding complexity. Along the way he argues that SRP is really about people requesting changes, that perfectionism in code is a trap, that learning effort should be allocated by ROI rather than zeal, and that starting unit tests early reshaped his career. Written for engineers with production experience who are rethinking code quality and their own growth.