Saturday Morning Clarity: The Courage to Simplify

It's just past 9AM on a rainy Portland Saturday, and I'm sitting at my desk with my weekend coffee ritual in full swing. Yesterday's Halloween hangover (of the sugar variety—four leftover candy bars for breakfast was perhaps not my wisest decision) has finally subsided, leaving me in that rare state of weekend clarity where work thoughts can exist without their usual urgency.

Looking back at my posts this week—from obstacles as teachers to recursive patterns to the masks we wear—I'm noticing a meta-pattern emerging:

```javascript
const evolutionaryTrend = {
junior: { focus: "Adding complexity to prove capability" },
mid: { focus: "Managing complexity through patterns and abstractions" },
senior: { focus: "Having the courage to eliminate unnecessary complexity" }
};
```

This hit me last night while refactoring that over-engineered system I mentioned yesterday. After three hours of work, my PR showed more deleted code than added. The seven layers of abstraction became three. The system now does exactly what it did before, but with 60% less code.

And it terrified me.

Not because I feared it wouldn't work—my tests confirmed it did—but because simplicity feels naked. Exposed. Without the protective armor of clever abstractions, there's nowhere to hide. The code just... is. And by extension, so am I.

The senior engineer I aspire to be isn't the one who creates the most intricate systems, but the one with enough security in their craft to strip away everything non-essential. To stand confidently beside something simple and say, "Yes, this is enough."

Mastery, it seems, isn't an additive process but a subtractive one. It's not about having more tools but about knowing which ones to leave in the toolbox.

For the coming week, I'm challenging myself to approach each problem with this question: "What's the simplest solution that could possibly work?" Not as a shortcut, but as an act of courage—the courage to be seen without my complexity masks.

Now to finish this coffee and spend the rest of my Saturday working on my indie game with this new lens. What complexity can I remove there? What masks am I still wearing in that code?