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Discussion on: How do you identify "over-engineering"?

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Lars Richter

Hi Ben. Another cool discussion about a real-world topic. I planned to write a post about over-engineering for a few weeks now.
This discussion reminded me to get back to my draft and finish it.

I published it a few minutes ago. You can find it here:

But to answer your question, I think over-engineering is all about adding additional complexity to code that could be much simpler.
I think most (experienced) developers (including myself) have been guilty of over-engineering. Remember the day when you learned a framework/design pattern/tool that you thought is really cool. That is the same day when you excessively start to look for places where you can use it.
It happened. And it will happen again. We will just have to find a way to deal with it in a solution-oriented way.