Two Complexity Audit slots open for Q2.

Over the past month: the Architecture Tax, TCA calculation, and three case studies. Amazon, 37signals, Segment. Some of you ran your own numbers.

If that number was large enough to act on, this is the next step.

A Complexity Audit is 2 to 4 weeks. Fixed scope. Fixed price. I map your architecture against the TCA model and produce a document your CFO can read.

simplicity-first.dev/ArchAssessment

Baseball History Project -- Opening Day 2026 Update!!

Just shipped significant performance improvements and UX refinements to the Baseball History Project. Data now runs from 1871 all the way through the 2025 season.

154 years of professional baseball to explore.

Box scores, franchise history, player careers. It's all there, and faster than ever.

https://baseballhistoryproject.com

#Baseball #OpeningDay #MLB #Sabermetrics #WebDev #opensource

Microservices consume 20% more CPU and 44% more energy than a monolith doing the same work.

IT is projected to consume 21% of all global energy by 2030. The internet already produces more carbon than commercial aviation.

The $44.5B in cloud waste is not just wasted money. It is wasted electricity.

The architecture tax is environmental, not just financial.

Simplification is climate action.

https://simplicity-first.dev

htmxRazor v1.4.0 is out.

Seven features: SSE streaming with IAsyncEnumerable server helpers, a multi-step wizard with TempData state, a timeline component, response-aware forms with per-status-code error handling, optimistic UI on button/switch/rating, load more pagination, and dialog size variants.

147 new tests. 1,802 total. No breaking changes.

dotnet add package htmxRazor

https://htmxRazor.com

River City AI & Dev User Group — first meetup!

April 15 • Grand Rapids, MI • 6 PM

A community for developers interested in AI, web, mobile, .NET, Rust, and open-source. All experience levels welcome.

RSVP → https://www.meetup.com/river-city-ai-dev-group/events/313909270/?eventOrigin=group_upcoming_events

#RiverCityAI #GrandRapids #AI #Programming #OpenSource #Fediverse

A CFO reviews the quarterly cloud bill. 34% over budget. Again. She asks who is responsible. Nobody is lying. Nobody is responsible.

$44.5B in projected cloud waste for 2026. Only 30% can attribute costs to teams. 49% of IT leaders believe >25% is wasted.

New essay applies Hardin’s tragedy of the commons to cloud infrastructure. Why FinOps addresses symptoms. Why does a chargeback fail? What Ostrom’s Nobel Prize research says actually works.

https://simplicityfirstphilosophy.substack.com/p/the-tragedy-of-the-cloud-commons

Shopify: modular monolith, $100B market cap.
Stack Overflow: vertical scaling, 100M+ developers.
Basecamp: 8 servers, left the cloud entirely.

The next time someone says monoliths do not scale, share this list.

Every one of these companies measured before they decided. They did not follow convention. They followed arithmetic.

What other companies belong on this list?

#softwarearchitecture #softwaredevelopment #economics

https://simplicityfirstphilosophy.substack.com/p/the-architecture-tax

Asked AI to design a payment system.

It returned 14 files, 3 abstraction layers, a service registry, and an event bus.

The requirement needed 1 file and 47 lines.

AI has learned from every architecture post that celebrates complexity. It gives you all of it, every time.

The 2 AM Test does not care who wrote the code. It asks whether a tired engineer can debug it.

AI gives you speed. The Three Filters give you direction.

https://simplicity-first.dev

#softwarearchitecture #softwaredev #ai