Notes on Over-Engineering: A Project Post-Mortem
Part of the DevOops: Learning from Failure specialist track
Join me for a retrospective on a reusable Django app for providing shared database multi-tenancy, complete with automatic tenant-specific queryset filtering, automatic tenant selection middleware, REST framework support, and comprehensive test coverage. This app, despite its sophistication, was never used in production. Let's explore why it was ultimately deemed over-engineered and unnecessary, and what lessons we can learn from this experience.
I have a story to share about the pitfalls of over-engineering—a project that resulted in a powerful yet unused Django library for shared database multi-tenancy. This library included automatic tenant-specific querysets, tenant selection middleware, REST framework support, and full test coverage across multiple Python and Django versions. Despite all of its advanced features and the confidence of complete test coverage, it was abandoned before deployment. In this talk, I’ll discuss the journey of this project, from its ambitious beginnings to its eventual demise, highlighting key lessons learned about scope creep, planning pitfalls, and some of the harsh realities of software development.
Professional software developer, Amateur rocket scientist and astronomer. Loves Python, Django, cats, working on their personal software and hardware projects, everything space, playing games of all kinds, and tinkering with 3D Printers.