You Can’t Unboil a Frog – How to Cope When Your Tech Stack is a Hot Mess of Complexity – Encore Blog
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A reflection on how startup tech stacks gradually accumulate complexity — the 'boiling frog' problem — until team productivity collapses. The author argues that teams often fall victim to the sunk cost fallacy rather than addressing the root cause. The recommended solution is to make bold changes and adopt a fresh stack rather than patching an existing mess. The post uses this framing to introduce Encore, a backend developer platform aimed at reducing complexity through automated DevOps, infrastructure management, and built-in tooling for local development, observability, testing, and documentation.
Table of contents
From Freshwater to Hot Soup: An All Too Common JourneySunk Cost Fallacy and The Ostrich EffectYou Probably Need A New FrogWhat we're doing about itWrapping upAbout The Author2 Impressions