“Cloud” has been a buzzword for years. What does it actually mean? A half-joking definition might be simply “someone else’s computer”. You click a link and you’re magically connected over the internet to a server and software housed in a data center…somewhere. The big names, like Amazon, Google, eBay, etc, have data centers all over the world in order to provide improved performance by locating closer to the originating client, but also for redundancy in case of a disaster or outage in one particular area. For the most part, you don’t have to worry about any of that. You just go about your business or pleasure utilizing the application, API, or other hosted services.

The blog post “Minimalism — The most undervalued development skill” struck a nerve. You see examples of this all the time in IT. Voluminous documents collecting the requirements and describing the design of some gigantic new system meant to address an important business challenge or opportunity. The solution invariably ends up being 10X the size, complexity, and price of the documents themselves and rarely meets the intended goals. Why?