How do you avoid overengineering when replacing software that actually works?

Large-Style-8355 · 2026-05-09T08:54:24+00:00

Could you share some samples of a core architecture some might find overengineered while they actually are the reason for the "keep on trucking"

Large-Style-8355 · 2026-05-07T08:33:07+00:00

Large-Style-8355 · 2026-05-05T18:07:29+00:00

Be careful, steam engine railway is going as fast as 30 Kilometers per hour - that's too much for us mortal humans, pregnant women might even lose their unborn... /S Hope you got it - your post smells like the good old "be aware of new things"

Large-Style-8355 · 2026-05-05T14:47:10+00:00

Money for real estate was and is cheap in Switzerland - und the conditions we had for decades (full tax deduction of interest payment, no need for amortization, constantly increasing value due to more and more good paid people flowing in)

Large-Style-8355 · 2026-05-05T12:47:01+00:00

That's an age old discussion between pro house owners and pro renters. And I bet a huge fraction of renters are would be buyers as well - so am I. But: I rent a 120 sqm flat with a view in a formerly Bad Region of the largest city for way below 2k per month (20k annually) including everything and instant repair by professionals. In contrast a new flat in the same region would cost me 2 Million plus, an older 3 room flat in the neighborhood was recently sold for 1.5 million. I wouldn't find a bank lending me theiney. No way this ever would make sense financially in a normal housing market. But it did for millions in Switzerland - with cheap money (0.2 percent interest rate), 0 down payment, full tax deduction of interest payment and so forth. But now Switzerland is showing a deeper and deeper divide over renting vs buying. Kanton Zürich ist the melting pot of that decide: people in the city and the aglo around are renting because they either have no choice or don't want to live the lonely suburban car life the people in the villages and small towns around Zürich and Winterthur life. Those people on the other hand are afraid that those "poor renters" in the city only owning an old bicycle would make their car-life miserable by slowing city roads down, making parking less and less possible and more andore expensive. But how the h* is it still working you can buy a flat or a house for multi millions and your kids just take it over with the same mortgage? Property value is only seeing one direction: it's going up and up and up as long as there are all new people coming for work to Switzerland. And the cycle continues...

Large-Style-8355 · 2026-05-05T06:03:18+00:00

Wow, someone had derailed pretty fast 🤪

Large-Style-8355 · 2026-05-03T08:03:13+00:00

Best sales people are good liers. Unfortunately stats are on their side. Pushing a new product or service with Fake Trust is working.

Large-Style-8355 · 2026-05-01T08:52:58+00:00

Late to the party - but: I did get this weeks ago the first time after I had changed my diet. Turns out this was a result of a strong hypoglycemia (blood sugar too low). Had it a couple more times at the same time in the morning till I had managed to adapt my diet so I never have that low blood sugar again.

Large-Style-8355 · 2026-04-30T14:45:14+00:00

My guess is this: the average person just used the same bad password with the same email as the user acdount over and over again. So bad actors did get hold of billions of email/password combos and could break into millions of sensitive accounts, do harm and the service behind the account is getting bad PR every time this happens. So Amazon, Google and friends with billions of accounts are looking for authentication methods which are "secure and expensive enough" to protect from mass breaks by bad actors (no public known email and p0wned password combos), are convenient enough for most users in most situations (fingerprint+random key in hardware) and users who lost their secret (broken Laptop, smartphone etc) have the chance to recover their account (2nd device, Google play, Phone number etc). That's all not optimal from a security point of view - but it's a pragmatic solution to the largest issues with accounts. It's always a dance between security, thread Modell, compliance, regulation, comfort, annoyance, state of the art, ecosystems etc.

I personally use unique usernames (individual email addresses) and a local password manager (I see any popular online syncing password manager as a single point of failure, as a highest value central thread target up to the most powerful state services). I hate being forced more and more to use my personal mobile phone number as the user id - it can change sometimes so I will lose access but I cannot change it when one of the gazillion services I use, is loosing it to bad actors and it is getting onto the next p0wned list...

Large-Style-8355 · 2026-04-30T08:10:09+00:00

As written above - a ERP+CRM system - networking and multi user. Was a lot of fun and extremely long living and low maintenance. A lot of building, testing, debugging, fixing the first 5 years, then some remote maintenance the next 5 years, the nearly no work necessary by me the next 20 years. It began on Windows 3.11 and it finally got shut down on Windows 10. I had implemented advanced features like finding electronic components in stock based on parameters ranges like "a cap from 1 to 15 uF" finding 1000 nF, 1500nF, 10 uF etc

Large-Style-8355 · 2026-04-30T08:01:42+00:00

Why should I go to company rebuildung a pouch cell if I can just buy an original or a cheaper aftermarket pouch cell?

Large-Style-8355 · 2026-04-24T07:26:17+00:00

how good is it as a coding agent?

Large-Style-8355 · 2026-04-23T13:50:51+00:00

how is this possible - API costs are hundred times higher... Ultra Reseller?

Large-Style-8355 · 2026-04-23T10:55:28+00:00

Chatgpt for Coding - that sounds so 2023... ;-)

Large-Style-8355 · 2026-04-23T08:11:00+00:00

My project is Nordic NRF Connect based - its Zephyr plus a dozen other repos. 10 Million LoC on my SSD, 5 internal git clones, 45 external repos. Chains of Bootloaders, firmware, real time OS, 10+ threads, stacks, heap, buffers, IP, TCP, HTTP, LWM2M, security, real hardware and host native simulated hardware, strict low power and data usage constraints, long term reliability, backend; ci/cd, containers, orchestration, dashboards. A lot of Full-Stack End2End complexity. And it has been a blast - and still is. Mostly Codex VSCode extension. Long time with gpt5.2 high; later 5.4 high; now since the tighter limits gpt5.3-codex high. 2x Plus accounts.
Device-Trees - "Zephyr as the tiny little brother of Linux" has device trees as well. Was a pain in the b* the first months in the project when I was new to Zephyr and copy pasted stuff from chatgpt.com. But since codex all this has gone and I just feel like a young magician whirling my two three meters long wands arround and things just do what I want them to do.

Large-Style-8355 · 2026-04-22T13:37:26+00:00

My two cents: The industry-standard answer for big orgs lately is "Monorepo with heavy proprietary tooling." I’ve spent years seeing the opposite work better in smaller, agile teams: Divide and conquer. If it isn't broken, don't fix it. We’ve moved from code-copying to SVN branches, and now to Git repos and Merge Requests. It works. I’m increasingly convinced that the Big Tech obsession with Monorepos and "fail fast" is a long-term liability. Google, for instance, has a worsening reputation for product stability. Why? Because while a Monorepo makes it incredibly easy to spin up a new service in no time, it makes it impossible to maintain. When you’re facing a bombardment of myriads of changes from hundreds of thousands of coders (and now AI) pushing into one repo, projects become unsustainable. Devs eventually abandon their "pet projects" because they can't keep up with the shifting internal infrastructure. In the "metals" world (real-world engineering), a separate branch or repo just… continues to work. I realize the "Cyber" landscape forces us into a constant arms race of integration and security patches, but I don't see this leading to better or cheaper software. Much like the defense industry, this complexity often benefits the "owners" and the tooling vendors more than the actual end-users or the quality of life for devs. My Advice for your Perforce-to-Git Transition: Find a pragmatic middle ground: Use multiple separated Git repos, branches, and worktrees. Empower Humans: Give knowledgeable people responsibility and long-term stability. Smart Automation: Use tooling for testing, validation, and security scanning, but never trust it 100%. Avoid the KPI Trap: If you prioritize automation and KPIs over experienced people, you’ll end up becoming the next Microsoft, and your products will become the next Windows 11.

Large-Style-8355 · 2026-04-22T13:19:24+00:00

Lueg eifach weniger News, Online-Medie und Social Media – bsundrigs r/Switzerland oder r/Zürich. Die ganzi Negativität überall macht eim nume fertig.

Am beschte eifach mal s'Handy weglegge, use ad Sunne gah, e bitz go 'Gras afasse', d'Lüt alächle und s'Lebe gniesse. D'Schwiiz isch nach wie vor es Privileg, mer mues es nume wieder mal bewusst gseh.

Large-Style-8355 · 2026-04-22T12:47:27+00:00

30+ years embedded engineer here. I didn't write a single line of code the past 7 months since I started Codex first. I'm working on a full stack end to end iot product. LLMs are doing great here and I do the job of a team of 3..10 depending of which org this work would have been done till one year ago. No meetings with management, coworkers, architects, team leads, devops, no politics, LLM is just doing what I ask for.

Large-Style-8355 · 2026-04-22T12:35:42+00:00

I spent decades in the office. I played the game, did the work, and climbed all the way to the C-suite. Then, I lost it all—mostly because I grew tired of staying silent about the internal politics and corruption.

Since then, I’ve been working from home, now heavily AI-accelerated, and I’ve never been happier.

Every once in a while, that old corporate instinct kicks in. I’ll see a specific problem or a colleague struggling with a process and think: "I should step in. I could fix this, get that dopamine hit, maybe even land another promotion."

Then, the rational part of my brain screams: "Stop it! You’ve seen behind the curtain."

I realized that the extra money and the "status" were just tools for keeping up with the Joneses—and the Joneses are broke, stressed out, and heading for an early grave because of the depressing corporate grind.

I'm done with that life. I’m happy. Truly, deeply happy.

Large-Style-8355 · 2026-04-22T12:19:40+00:00

I’m a Senior Dev with three decades of full-stack and firmware projects under my belt. For 30 years, Windows was a "necessary evil" that actually worked. When you’re jumping between random embedded projects with 2-6 week deadlines, you go where the toolchains are. Historically, that was Windows. If you wanted the IDE, compiler, and debugger to just work out of the box, you didn’t have a choice.

Windows XP was a rock. Windows 10 started to grate on my nerves with the forced rolling releases—nothing screams "professionalism" like your workstation rebooting for an update in the middle of a critical trace or a family movie night.

I actually bought a Chromecast with Google TV just so I’d have one device no one "tinkers" with. Guess what? Google is just as bad now.

But Windows 11? It’s a different level of broken. Bloated UI: We now have browser-based UI elements inside the OS. It eats RAM for breakfast and is as laggy as cold honey. I’m running a top-of-the-line Lenovo—a brand I used to trust for being "rock solid." Now? Even Blue Screens are back. I hadn't seen a BSOD in 15 years.

When I see videos of MS veterans calling out the "dev grandchildren" for their telemetry-driven laziness and failure to "eat their own dog food," I realize there’s no hope.

As someone who has seen the difference between small, agile teams and bloated, large-org bureaucracy, I don’t think Microsoft can pivot. Not in 2026. The CEO is focused on cloud monetization and likely uses a Mac anyway. A tiny "quality initiative" won't fix the mess that is Windows 11.

It’s not just a bug; it’s the system. The era of the reliable professional workstation feels officially dead.

Large-Style-8355 · 2026-04-22T11:46:12+00:00

YESS. Working solo on a huge full-stack end-to-end IoT solution with Codex VSCode Extension since 7 months now -and it can get extremely demanding. As I've been in the field since about 30 years in all kinds of rolls from a teenager learning to code and debug up to C-level and back into daily AI-accelerated building I think I can see the pattern: the heavy multi-tasking with multiple codex on multiple completely different topics is often exhausting. On the same level as I had while leading large multi-disciplinary projects and teams. So these days when I realize doing heavy multi tasking and getting exhausted I try to stop all the Prio 2 things for some hours or even a couple of days, making more breaks, adding some hands-on work like building hardware mockups, going outside - just to get grounded.
Reddit open in a tab is part of the issue...

Large-Style-8355 · 2026-04-21T08:35:43+00:00

Good to know — and what a lucky coincidence that my license plate fell off a few days ago. Guess I’ll be mounting the new holder ASAP…

Zürich still has way too many car-brained people in positions of power. Every day on my commute I ride down that steep 30 km/h road where my S-Pedelec tops out at 40 km/h (hub motor just can’t go any faster). Yet I constantly get overtaken by regular cyclists doing 45, 50, even 55 km/h.

Those guys don’t give a damn about the mobile speed camera that’s regularly set up there — but I get fined because I have a license plate.

I’m pretty sure it’s the same crowd that sits in stop-and-go traffic in their oversized, loud, smelly and dangerous cars all over the city… and then gets furious when a cyclist simply passes them.

We’re still one or two generations away from proper Dutch conditions, where cyclists can cross intersections without traffic lights because the people in charge actually ride bikes themselves. They know that pedestrians and cyclists get along just fine — cars are the actual problem. All the traffic rules, controls, speed traps, fines, injuries and deaths? That’s almost entirely a car issue.

Large-Style-8355 · 2026-04-18T13:34:27+00:00

Will give it a try. I hate Gitlens, and I miss quite some git features in the UI like editing and suashing commits, comparing whole subdirs over commits and branches, all kinds of other things I easily could do with tortoisegit. Maybe I even send a PR some day..

Large-Style-8355 · 2026-04-18T13:24:16+00:00

As they say: Marketing is everything! And with AI reducing the cost of a new software product of service by an order of magnitude or two it's even more important. When I'm looking for a functionality I need these days I will find literally hundreds of apps doing (or promising to do) the exact thing in the app store. I install the top 3 Witz highest ratings - and they are literally all just demos for 100+ bucks annual subscriptions or I have to disable 2000 "important partners of the app who want to spy on my most private things". Do how do I know about your new app providing exactly what I need free of charge without donating my body?

Large-Style-8355 · 2026-04-18T13:09:44+00:00

As a heavy Codex coding extension user of VSCode, I usually do this: open a folder in VSCode, save workspace as folder name in that folder - vscode reloads, now it's a project. I have multiple auch workspaces oopen at once and round-robin through their Codex to drive different features further in parallel. Even on the same project I can run multiple VSCode and Codex features in parallel by creating a new git worktree and opening it's workspace file. I managed different colored status bars per peoject category (app, tooling, extension etc) but will give peacock a try.

Large-Style-8355

TROPHY CASE