Software engineering these days is out of control. Microservices and micro-frontends, modular monoliths, HTTP or gRPC APIs, messaging, event-driven, event-sourced... is it any wonder that projects run into trouble before they've even shipped anything?

A good response to this is to say "we should keep things as simple as possible." But how simple is that? In this talk we'll look at some patterns, processes, tools and services; ask whether we NEED them; and if we do, find the simplest possible solution. We'll look at abstractions and where they do and don't belong. And you will learn how to say "we don't need that," or at least "we don't need that yet."