Everyone has seen this or a variation of the midwit meme.

If you think the meme describes 3 different types of people, you’re both right and wrong because:

every midwit meme describes a journey, not a classification.

— sunil pai, etc. (@threepointone)

Lately at work I’ve been working on a pretty interesting thing which has me reaching for certain tools and techniques that I’ve thought to be overkill in the past. Being all day on Hacker News and reading a bunch of elitist comments parading about tech minimalism and ownership can only do so much.

The thing is, I’m beginning to realise performance isn’t really difficult in modern applications if you choose the right tools – be it programming languages or libraries you use. If you’re thoughtful, even the bare minimum amount, you’ll get enough juice out of your system.

What’s difficult is to scale performance in presence of constraints.

And coming to my previous point, I used to believe all these shiny technologies are overkill. Turns out I’ve never worked with actual constraints for actual scale. Hence, the midwit meme. I feel I’m entering that phase. Containers, microservices, Kubernetes and serverless all make sense to some extent now because I see some need for them. I’ve become mid. Enjoyer of technologies.

Now I might be doing disservice to these technologies by putting them into a category in which only us midwits believe in. But I only do so because, as cool as it all is, it sure should be simpler. It sure should be easier. And I believe realising how to do that would mean going further right in the chart.

What comes then, I don’t know. I’m not in a rush to find out.