Keep it simple, stupid.

Four words. The whole philosophy fits in four words. That’s the beauty of it. It is, by its very nature, simple. It doesn’t need a TED talk. It doesn’t need a framework. It doesn’t need a manifesto. It just needs you to stop making things harder than they need to be.

At nervous.net, this is basically our religion. When we’re building something and it starts getting complicated, someone says it. Keep it simple. Does this feature need to exist? Does this abstraction actually help anyone? Is this clever, or is it just clever? There’s a difference between elegant and overcomplicated, and the line between them is thinner than most engineers want to admit.

And I believe this. Deeply. Professionally, I will go to the mat for simplicity. I will argue against the extra layer of abstraction. I will advocate for the boring solution over the clever one. I will look a developer in the eye and say “what if we just… didn’t do that?” and mean it with my whole chest.

I am a KISS evangelist. A simplicity missionary. A man of the simple cloth.

And then I go home and I am an absolute disaster.

My blog — the one you are reading right now — is a point-and-click adventure game. It has pixel art sprites. It has an animated cat that wanders across the page. It has weather effects. It has a day/night cycle. It has multiple themes you can switch between. There are tiles. There are cursors. There is a header that looks like it was ripped out of a Sierra game from 1991.

This is not simple. This is the opposite of simple. This is what happens when someone who preaches KISS at work comes home and lets the ADHD goblins drive.

And it’s not just the blog. It’s everything. I don’t just pick up a hobby — I research it for three days, buy equipment I don’t need yet, join a subreddit, watch seventeen YouTube videos, and then maybe try it once before moving on to the next thing. I don’t just make a to-do list — I evaluate four different to-do apps, decide none of them work, and then build my own. I don’t just cook dinner — I decide tonight is the night I’m going to make the perfect chocolate chip cookie from scratch and I need a kitchen scale now.

The KISS principle is about restraint. It’s about knowing when to stop. It’s about recognizing that the simplest solution that works is almost always the best one. And professionally, I know this. I practice this. I preach this.

But personally? Personally, I am a chaos goblin who looked at a perfectly functional blog template and said “what if there were sprites.”

I think about this tension a lot. Why am I so good at simplicity when I’m getting paid for it and so catastrophically bad at it on my own time? And the answer, I think, is that KISS is a discipline. It’s not a personality trait. It’s a practice. It’s something you have to actively choose, over and over, every time your brain says “but what if we added just one more thing?”

At work, there are guardrails. Deadlines. Colleagues who will look at your pull request and say “why.” The structure forces simplicity because complexity has a cost that everyone can see.

At home, there are no guardrails. There’s just me, my laptop, and a brain that thinks “you know what this blog needs? A parallax scrolling background.” And nobody is there to say “why” because I live in my own head and my head thinks this is all a great idea.

So here’s what I’ve landed on. KISS isn’t about being simple. It’s about choosing simple. And choosing simple is hard. It’s harder than the complicated thing, actually, because the complicated thing is where your brain naturally wants to go. Every feature you don’t add, every abstraction you skip, every hobby you don’t research into oblivion — that’s an active choice. That’s discipline.

I’m good at that discipline at work. I’m terrible at it at home. And I think that’s okay? I think maybe the blog with the pixel art cat and the weather effects is what happens when you spend all day exercising restraint and then come home and let yourself be a person. The pressure valve. The place where simple doesn’t have to win.

Keep it simple, stupid. Unless you’re at home. Then add the sprites.