Overengineering: Future-Proofing, Ego, or Just a Way to Learn?
I’ll admit it: I knowingly overengineered one of my projects.
This was supposed to be a small prototype, the kind of thing you might spin up as a monolith and keep simple until you proved it had users. Instead, I went the other way. I designed a full-blown microservices architecture: twenty-five services in total, each with its own scope, running in containers with sidecars, and talking through an API Gateway powered by Dapr. Some people would look at that and say: “Why on earth would you build microservices for something that might not even make it past launch?”
The honest answer?
Because it was my project, and I could.
Because I wanted to see how far I could push the architecture.
And because I knew that even if it was “too much” for day one, the exercise would teach me things I’d carry into every project afterward.
I built out submodules that would later evolve into reusable packages: protobuf contracts, shared entities, infrastructure, and DTOs. I didn’t really need gRPC for this project, but since I was already overengineering, I decided to go all in. If we were going to make mistakes, we might as well make them at scale.
The design even went so far as to split CRUD operations into separate microservices — one for Create, one for Read, one for Update, and one for Delete. It sounds ridiculous on paper, but the approach turned into a repeatable template. After spending three weeks building the first four services, the rest started to flow quickly. All I had to do was swap names, entities, and DTOs, and the microservices became almost cookie-cutter.
Of course, there are trade-offs. Running twenty-five containerized services with sidecars is expensive, and the deployment costs will head straight to the sky if the project grows. A monolith would have been simpler and cheaper in the short term. But what I gained was invaluable: experience in structuring microservices, designing reusable modules, and building scalable patterns. If TuJuerga ever does take off, the foundation is there for multi-tenant scaling. And even if it doesn’t, I now have practical lessons in overengineering, what future-proofing looks like, and how to balance readability, reusability, and maintainability.
Why We Overengineer
If I’m being honest, a lot of overengineering comes down to ego. Developers want to show what they can do, prove to the team that they’re the person others should come to for advice, patterns, or ideas. Overengineering becomes a way of saying, “look at the architecture I built — this isn’t just a simple app, this is a system.” It’s not always just ego, though. Sometimes it’s ambition, sometimes it’s curiosity. But deep down, there’s always a bit of pride in building something bigger than necessary, just to prove that we can.
The Costs
The costs of overengineering are real. Complexity rises fast. What might take a single day in a straightforward design can balloon into two weeks of exploration, experimentation, and implementation. New technologies and patterns make the learning curve even steeper. Eventually, the pace picks up. Once the first services are done, the rest get easier. But the initial investment is enormous, and for a project that might never need that level of complexity, it’s hard to justify.
The Benefits
For me, the biggest benefit is freedom. I get to explore technologies and patterns I might never touch on a tight schedule at work. This baby project was my playground for experimenting with gRPC, Dapr, and microservice design at a scale that would have been out of the question in a corporate environment. And yes, the ego plays a role here too. I can bring back what I learned into the workplace and say: “I’ve done this before. I know how it works.” Overengineering became a way to level up, even if the project itself didn’t demand it.
Stagnation and Passion
There’s another reason we overengineer: fear of stagnation.
In our day jobs, it’s easy to get stuck in repetition — fixing the same bugs, deploying the same patterns, living on the corporate hamster wheel where every sprint feels like a rerun of the one before it. You start to worry about relevance. Are you growing? Are you keeping up? Or are you slowly drifting into becoming outdated? That’s why baby projects become a canvas for overengineering. They’re where we fight back against the monotony. We throw every tool, every pattern, every new technology into the mix, even if it’s frustrating and messy. We do it because we love this profession.
For me, it always goes back to the same feeling I had as an eight-year-old kid, watching my first Space Invaders clone come to life on a Commodore 64. That moment of amazement, of seeing a screen respond to something I had built — fast, error-free, doing exactly what I asked of it — has never left me. Every time I overengineer a project, every time I push through the frustration of trying to make something work for the thousandth time, I’m chasing that same wide-eyed glare I had as a kid. It’s not just about future-proofing, or ego, or technical ambition. It’s about keeping the spark alive.
The Balance
In the end, it comes back to balance. Not every call needs a middleware to interact with an operation. Not every project needs dozens of services. Sometimes the best solution is also the simplest one. The principle that helps me most is KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid. When complexity is necessary — for scalability, for maintainability, for learning — then build it. But when it’s not, simplicity will almost always win in the long run.
Takeaway
Overengineering isn’t always a waste of time. Sometimes it’s an investment in learning, in building a foundation for the future, or even in feeding that developer ego that drives us to grow. The key is recognizing when you’re genuinely future-proofing — and when you’re just complicating things for the sake of it. The best codebases are the ones that balance both: simple where they can be, sophisticated where they must be. And the only way to find that balance is by sometimes going too far, learning the hard way, and carrying those lessons forward.
