Aurora Borealis

An architect’s first work is apt to be spare and clean. He knows he
doesn’t know what he’s doing, so he does it carefully and with great
restraint.

As he designs the first work, frill after frill and embellishment
after embellishment occur to him. These get stored away to be used
“next time”. Sooner
or later the first system is finished, and the architect, with firm
confidence and a demonstrated mastery of that class of systems, is ready
to build a
second system.

This second is the most dangerous system a man ever designs. When he
does his third and later ones, his prior experiences will confirm each
other as to
the general characteristics of such systems, and their differences
will identify those parts of his experience that are particular and not
generalizable.

The general tendency is to over-design the second system, using all the
ideas and frills that were cautiously sidetracked on the first one. The
result,
as Ovid says, is a “big pile”.

Fred Brookes, The Mythical Man-Month