After years of building software, certain patterns keep emerging. Here are the lessons I keep coming back to when working on the hidden cost of microservices.

Key Principles

Simplicity wins. The easiest code to maintain is the code you never wrote.
Measure before optimizing. Intuition about performance is almost always wrong.
Ship incrementally. Small, frequent deploys beat big-bang releases every time.
Write tests for confidence, not for coverage metrics.

These aren't revolutionary ideas. But the gap between knowing them and consistently applying them is where most teams struggle.

Simple can be harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean enough to make it simple. — Steve Jobs