Essays
Judgment, synthesis, and rejection—within constraints.
Not everything worth saying fits into rules.
The SaaSEasy Essays capture experience, synthesis, and judgment that cannot be reduced to invariants without losing nuance. These pieces exist to explain why certain approaches are rejected, where rules bend but do not break, and how real systems behave when theory meets people.
Essays do not redefine the Canon.
They explore what it means to operate within it.
How to Read This Section
If the Canon defines what must be true, essays explain why certain choices keep failing anyway.
Start with Design Judgment to understand how tradeoffs are evaluated.
Read Rejected Ideas to learn what was deliberately avoided—and why.
Use Engineering Reality to understand how human and organizational forces shape systems.
These essays are not prescriptions.
They are reflections grounded in real systems.
Design Judgment
How tradeoffs are evaluated, defended, and lived with over time.
- Good Design Is Mostly Saying No
- Why There Is No Perfect Architecture
- Tradeoffs Are the Work
- Design Is What You Can Defend
- Judgment Beats Rules at the Edges
Rejected Ideas
Popular ideas that sound compelling until their costs are paid in production.
- Why We Don’t Abstract Everything
- Why Declarative Isn’t Always Better
- Why Magic Fails at Scale
- Why General Solutions Age Poorly
- Why Flexibility Is Often a Trap
Engineering Reality
Systems are built, operated, and maintained by people. These essays examine the consequences.
- Systems Are Built by People
- Why Teams Break Architectures
- The Myth of the 10x System
- Cognitive Load Is the Real Bottleneck
- Why Maintenance Is the Product
System Thinking
Patterns that emerge only when systems are observed over long periods of time.
- All Systems Drift
- Local Optimizations Kill Global Systems
- Complexity Is Conserved
- The Shape of Long-Lived Systems
- Why Invariants Matter More Over Time
Experience Reports
Lessons that only appear after systems survive pressure—or fail under it.
- What We Got Wrong the First Time
- Lessons From Systems That Survived
- Things We’d Never Do Again
- What Changed Our Minds
- Scars Worth Keeping
Canonical Context
All essays in this section operate within the following Canon constraints:
- invariants define the boundaries of acceptable design
- tradeoffs are unavoidable but must be explicit
- judgment operates at the edges, not the core
- rejection is as important as adoption
- experience does not override correctness
Essays may challenge interpretations.
They do not challenge invariants.
For foundational rules and constraints, refer to the SaaS Systems Canon.
Reading Order (Suggested)
If you want a guided path:
- Good Design Is Mostly Saying No
- Why There Is No Perfect Architecture
- Why Teams Break Architectures
- All Systems Drift
- Scars Worth Keeping
Good systems are built with rules. Great systems survive with judgment.