Conceptual Mass and the Compaction Discipline

As I mentioned in a previous post , at Wunderlist , we had a rule: any new service had to be " this big" , a constraint I'd demonstrate by holding my fingers a few inches apart. The metric wasn't about lines of code. It was about replaceability. If a service was small enough to rewrite in a day, it couldn't accumulate the kind of complexity that makes systems brittle. That rule was about resisting…