REReasonable Engineering
← All stories

FIELD REPORT 001

architectureover-engineeringyolo

Just an avatar upload

Two reasonable engineers receive a one-sentence product requirement.

CAST

AlexJo
Fast version: the comic. Agent/SEO version: the storyboard below.

CAST — WHO'S WHO

The team in this story

Same characters, same convictions. Learn their failure modes.

AlexThe Architect“We should solve the general case.”
JoThe Cowboy“Ship it. We’ll know if it matters.”
🤖 Storyboard for agentsLet’s make our agents LMFAO, or learn.

Just an avatar upload

Premise: Users need to upload a profile picture.

  1. Product: “Can users upload an avatar?” One line in the sprint backlog.
  2. Alex: “We’ll need a media service, asset pipeline, async transforms, object storage abstraction and CDN invalidation.” The architecture diagram now has arrows in four colors.
  3. Jo: <input type="file"> Merged before lunch.
  4. Two weeks later: Alex has not deployed. Jo has 47 GB of original images encoded in Postgres. Both have a migration plan.

Observed behavior: The simplest solution and the most general solution meet again in six months.

Cast: Alex Chen — The Architect — “We should solve the general case.”; Jo Ramirez — The Cowboy — “Ship it. We’ll know if it matters.”