We talk about refactoring, as if beautiful code is all we need. But that's only a start. Small services are lovely to reason about internally, but they push complexity outward. Systems these days aren't so much written as assembled.

We write some code, our precious business logic, and then the real work is hooking everything together. Databases, web servers, routers, monitoring systems, search tools. Plus the easy stuff like version control, issue trackers, continuous integration.

Every piece both adds and takes away complexity. Even the most elegant technology is disaster when we implement it without befriending its internal concepts, or when we use it for an unsuited purpose.

Join Jessica as she finds both pain and beauty in the complexity of our systems. Will we ever find simplicity? or is the light at the end of the tunnel an oncoming enterprise service bus?