Recently went down a familiar rabbit hole while building a REST API for a simple task tracker. It started off clean just a few basic CRUD endpoints. Nothing fancy. Then, like always, I thought… “what if this scales?”
That’s where things went sideways.
I added nested routes, polymorphic relationships, custom middleware for edge cases I hadn’t even seen yet, and somehow convinced myself I needed event sourcing. For a task tracker. With zero users.
Two weeks later, I had something that looked impressive on paper but was painful in reality. Deployments were messy, debugging took forever, and performance? It struggled with even 10 concurrent users.
That’s when it clicked, I wasn’t building for real problems. I was building for imaginary ones.
So I stripped everything back.
I kept the API simple, clear endpoints, straightforward DTOs, basic validation using Zod, and plain Postgres queries. No magic. No overthinking.
The result?
Everything got better. Performance jumped, tests became easy to write, and for the first time in days, I actually enjoyed working on it again.
The big lesson: YAGNI is real. You really aren’t gonna need it at least not yet.
Now I try to follow a simple approach:
Build the simplest version that works and Only optimize when something actually breaks
So tell me.. have you ever done this too? Like overbuilt something and then regretted it?
Agree with the emphasis on modularity upfront, as it aligns with my YAGNI takeaway, start simple but layer cleanly for future refactors without a full rewrite. In my case, zero users meant no pressure for premature complexity, letting me ship fast and iterate based on actual needs. Experience definitely sharpens that balance. What's one modular pattern you'd recommend for a basic CRUD API?