incidental complexity pollutes creative process

i’ve been circling around these thoughts for a little while because i’ve been trying to reconcile my desire to creatively express myself through programming with the feelings of burnout from working in programming environments with too much complexity.

one example of this was of me trying to use kubernetes to experiment with different potential service architectures for a project. i thought this was a reasonable thing to attempt to do and a valuable learning experience but i quickly got blocked by the complexity and volume of configuration i needed to even get off the ground.

i think this phenomenon applies outside of programming as well, but it just so happens that we’ve engineered our field to have a lot of unnecessary complexity and polluted the potential for programming as an means for creative expression that everyone could have access to.