Simplicity The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. C.A.R. Hoare, Turing Award lecture Software systems are inherently dynamic and unstable.38 A software system can only be perfectly stable if it exists in a vacuum. If we stop changing the codebase, we stop introducing bugs. If the underlying hardware or libraries never change, neither of these components will introduce bugs. If we freeze the current user base, we’ll never have to scale the system. In fact, a good summar...