I remember it vividly: I was lying on my bed, cold and shaking. The room was turning. I was dizzy, angry, sad, full or reproaches, mostly toward myself. My nerves were breaking, my body was reacting. I couldn’t move anymore. It was 10 years ago, a Friday, late in the evening, after coming back from work. Working from 8am to midnight was no exception. I was working in a very small web agency as a beginner web developer, without any prior professional experience.

Global variables. Global states. These words induce fear and pain in every developer’s heart who had the unfortunate experience to deal with them. Did you already fight against applications behaving unexpectedly, without knowing exactly why, like a poor knight would try to kill an Hydra with too many heads to deal with? Did you end up in the infinite loop of tries and errors, guessing 90% of the time what was happening?

When I search about the KISS principle on The Internet, I stumble across many websites defining it in a couple of lines: simplicity is important, let’s be simple, the end. They often fail to explain what is simplicity, why simplicity is important, and how to achieve it. Simplicity is one of the driving idea we should keep in mind at all time when designing a system. The problem: it’s really hard to achieve.

Learning a programming language is stretching your skills, as a developer. It’s a new tool in your toolbox, too. With it, you can create something out of thin air. If you’re lucky, others will find your creation useful, and you’ll feel the warmth of being helpful. Beyond that, I love programming by itself: it’s a game to me. Logic is really fun to mess with. Learning is fun too: the excitement of discovery, the joy to finally understand a hard concept.

Did you ever feel overwhelmed by all these new techs popping up every other day? At the beginning of my career, I was trying to learn everything: every new technology, framework, and tool. A lot of my free time was dedicated to this endless quest. It was exhausting. With more experience, I began to realize that I felt into a trap: the trend twister. The more I was learning, the more I was understanding that all these techs were built on the same first principles, the same foundations we build upon for decades.