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Excellent article, well grounded in the reality of software development. New developers and managers would benefit from understanding the practical points made here as early as possible.

I do think perhaps there is too much emphasis on reuse and particularly cloud services. Ironically, this is partly for the reasons given elsewhere in the article. If you rely on outsourcing important things, you also naturally outsource the deep understanding of those important things, which can leave you vulnerable to problems you didn't anticipate. Also, any integration is a source of technical debt, so dependencies on external resources can be more fragile than they appear, and if something you rely on changes or even disappears then that is a new kind of potentially very serious problem that you didn't have to deal with before. Obviously I'm not advocating building every last thing in-house in every case, but deciding when to build in-house and when to bring something in can be more difficult than the article here might suggest.



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