Mar 08, 2025, by Elisa Uhura
I'm at an exciting moment of my life, I'm at a new team, side-projects are progressing well, life if rolling.
This was not cheap time wise. I had to invest a huge effort towards behavioral changes, deep reflections, and experiments as the first ideas tend to not work, or even make it worse.
Along those lines, I've found a lot of happiness in genuine simplicity. As an engineer, I've been used to mix up elegance with simplicity. They are very distinct concepts that somewhat generate similar outcomes.
As an example, I've delevoped a series of HTML replacements during the years, a DSL in Swift, a plugin engine in Objective-C, multiple designs in Go. All of those offered great powers like being able to write a blog post in a place a update indexes and list in others.
I disliked the blogging engines due to their unneeded complexity, but I also justified spending hours of my life writing tools that made things "simpler" as it was worth it.
On this track of making my life easier, I've decided to move to a WYSIWYG editor (SeaMonkey) and just plain write HTML. This was the most productive stint I had in the past. I wrote a dozen of now forgotten post, writing was just as easy as copying a template and writing down my toughts. Unfortunately, that stint met its end, but the proof that it was effective stayed.
Since then, my life entered into a constant flux of changes and I had brain power left to return to my hobbies but in the last year (2024), things started to settle a little. Then I've looped back into my initial ideas: a small DSL and some deployment scripts.
I had fun coding it, and I guess that was what I've wanted, but once it was done, it was clear to me that I did not need it.
Excersising simplicity teached me that I can get a lot more from my day, but also that there are multiple things trying to steal my attention, including myself. It is ok to spend some time trying a different design, but I don't need to force myself into using it unless I see a good reason for it.
Go Home.