Note: I posted this on LinkedIn in April 2023.

A long (long!) time ago, I wanted to learn some Perl. I did what many people did in those days: I went to the local bookstore and got an O’Reilly book called “Learning Perl.” I then learned some Perl, which required putting in the work, thinking critically, understanding the underlying concepts, and applying what I learned to real tasks. That’s how you learn things.

The Llama Book (as it came to be known based on the iconic cover illustration in O’Reilly house style of the time) has gone through eight editions since then. Around the third edition, the book cover added a tagline sourced from Perl culture:

“Making Easy Things Easy & Hard Things Possible”

Depending on your view of Perl, you might argue if Perl accomplished this goal for everyone in the long term, but I have always liked this statement.

I’ve been thinking about that slogan a lot lately. I want my teams and colleagues to design and build services that optimize for the easy path, work out of the box with a minimum of “it depends” followup, involve only as much complexity as is required and none more, and respect the cognitive burden we place on people who just want to get something done today.

Turns out this is harder than learning Perl, but my eyes are on this prize.