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Comment by sweetgiorni | Hacker News Reader

I read this years ago and it really resonated with me at the time. Why reinvent the wheel, right?

Reading it again now, it seems to advocate for going from one extreme to another without exercising judgement. A shell script might be fine in one context and irresponsible in another... but I guess nuance and circumstance don't make for interesting blog posts.

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Cobbling together a script is great for one-off work if it gets the job done. What it's not good for is your core business, if it's going to evolve and need refinement over a longer duration with continuous feature additions and changes. Maybe someone who's brilliant could start with a python script and evolve it into Django during the project, but could also simply switch to Django early on.

Yeah I totally agree, but I do think there are times when starting with the absolute most basic implementation that meets the business needs is the way to go. That could be a simple bash script, or a python script without Django, etc.

In my experience, the key is making those tradeoff decisions in an educated manner. Ideally, product and engineering and in sync and have a somewhat informed view of the future, so appropriate tradeoffs on velocity (simple bash script) versus extensibility (Python with Django) can be discussed.

Definitely true at startups where it's that or what else you could/should be doing, and maybe in a few months a pivot means it's mostly discarded for a new adventure.

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