Have less stuff

When I joined Cheddar I was pleasantly surprised to find a sharp, mostly minimalist development culture which was a pleasant departure from the ZIRP-era “platform and team sprawl” that was in full bloom at WeTransfer. The mostly-Shopify-inspired mindset - the Shopify of roughly 2012-2014, when Bouke and Tariq were there, long before the sharded-the-world Shopify of today - was extremely poignant and felt like a breath of fresh air: Let’s not have services, at most - we’ll have 2 Let’s not have Kubernetes and use GCP native VM scaling instead Let’s not have frontend bundling of any kind and rely on Rails builtins for any internal web plumbing Since then I took this approach to heart, and furthered it even when Bouke left for Monumental, and Emil chose for greener pastures as well. Time and time again, when we were faced with adding more systems and services to the stack, we resisted - and while I can’t prove we were right (we never ran the branch of history where we caved), not once…