You're an engineer with a Turborepo monorepo, pnpm workspaces, Next.js, Docker Compose with Kubernetes, Helm charts, GitHub Actions, Terraform, Datadog, and whatever landed on AWS this week.
You think you're building something sleek.
You're building a 40-story skyscraper to serve a lemonade stand.
A landing page with an email form should take an afternoon. Your setup: a CI/CD pipeline with 47 steps, server-side rendering for a page with no SEO requirements, and a GraphQL API for two fields.
Name and email. The client wanted a form to collect this. You built a spaceship to deliver a Post-it.
(I've seen a static HTML page—three sentences, one image—deployed via a monorepo with TypeScript, Prisma, Redis, and a GitHub Actions workflow longer than a CVS receipt. The README had an "architecture decisions" section. For a page that could've been index.html and a mailto link.)
That's not engineering. That's hoarding dependencies with an architecture blog post as alibi.
SSR sounds amazing on paper. Faster loads! Better SEO! In practice, you're debugging hydration errors at 2 AM because your server-rendered timestamp doesn't match your client-rendered timestamp. You invented a bug that HTML never had.
I've shipped code for 25+ years. I once ingested petabytes daily with PHP and duct tape. No Vercel. No hydration errors. Just code that worked.
Today, a blog loads slower than my GeoCities page did on dial-up.
We haven't gotten better at solving problems. We've gotten better at collecting tools.
Stop it.
❤️
Jake