The Million Straws of Modern Tech

"Why did one straw break the camel's back? Here's the secret — the million other straws underneath it."

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— Mos Def, "Mathematics"

In today's tech landscape, we're constantly tempted to look for the one reason something failed — why a system collapsed, a project derailed, or a team burned out.

But more often than not, it wasn't one bad decision. It wasn't one tool, one outage, or one missed deadline.

It was the buildup.

Every new platform, pipeline, dashboard, policy, or abstraction might seem small in isolation. But layer them together — without clarity, coordination, or cleanup — and you've created a fragile ecosystem no one fully understands or owns.

YAML: The Straw You Don't See

YAML is a perfect example of this invisible weight.

It's not just a configuration file. It's the glue between platforms, the scaffolding behind automation, and the unspoken contract between engineering teams.

But have you ever stopped to look at how much YAML your stack is carrying?

| Use Case | Average Line Count | |---|---| | Kubernetes Deployments | 20–150 lines | | GitHub Actions Workflows | 30–200 lines | | Docker Compose Files | 50–300 lines | | Ansible Playbooks | 100–500+ lines | | OpenAPI/Swagger Specs | 500–5,000+ lines |

None of these files are bad. But when they sprawl across hundreds of services, environments, and teams — what looks like "just config" quickly becomes a distributed knowledge burden.

And the worst part? It doesn't break right away.

It breaks quietly.

Then one day, a change to a 300-line workflow file unexpectedly reroutes a deployment, and someone asks: "How did this happen?"

Tech Doesn't Simplify — It Amplifies

The irony? Most of these tools were sold as simplifiers. But tech doesn't simplify — it amplifies.

If your systems, teams, and org charts are misaligned, technology will magnify that misalignment.

And then someone asks: "Why did this break?" "Why can't we ship?" "Why does it feel so brittle?"

It wasn't one straw.

It was the million others underneath it.

What Experience Taught Me

It took years of seeing this struggle firsthand — and even longer to realize that there isn't one "right" answer.

I've been lucky enough to work with engineers, platform teams, and operations folks who found clever, resilient, and sometimes wildly creative ways to carry the load.

And that's what made me appreciate the complexity — not as something to eliminate, but as something to understand, respect, and design for.

Because real progress doesn't come from pretending the camel isn't overloaded.

It comes from finally asking: What are we really asking our teams to carry?