Why good engineers think in terms of trade-off, not trends

Back in 2021, I remember being obsessed with GraphQL. Everyone on Twitter was praising it. Conferences were all about it. I thought, &ldquo;This is the future of APIs&rdquo;. &#xA; So, as a naive engineer, I rewrote a small project that was working perfectly fine with REST. Just to be on the &ldquo;right&rdquo; side of tech. &#xA; What followed was a week of edge cases and overengineered queries.…