Old Software Was Fast Because It Had No Choice
The article argues that modern software has become bloated not because of any single bad decision, but because hardware is too easy to provision. Using the example of a Java component launching a Spark cluster, the author points out that engineers routinely add memory and CPU 'just in case,' and these temporary patches harden into defaults. The JVM reads an inflated container limit and grows its heap, GC gets lazier, and resources are silently wasted. The real problem is that cost moves from the decision-maker to someone else—the person adding a dependency today is not the one debugging it tomorrow. The solution is explicit resource budgets that force teams to justify any increase in footprint. Recommended for backend engineers, SREs, and platform teams running services in the cloud.