In this recent post to his Medium.com site Subhas Dandapani shares what he sees as the top ten modern software over-engineering mistakes developers make in modern application development.

Few things are guaranteed to increase all the time: Distance between stars, Entropy in the visible universe, and Fucking business requirements. Many articles say Don't over-engineer but don’t say why or how. Here are 10 clear examples.

Important Note: Some points below like “Don’t abuse generics” are being misunderstood as “Don’t use generics at all”, “Don’t create unnecessary wrappers” as “Don’t create wrappers at all”, etc. I’m only discussing over-engineering and not advocating cowboy coding.

Points in his "top ten problems" list include:

• Engineering is more clever than Business
• Everything is Generic
• Shallow Wrappers
• Overzealous Adopter Syndrome
• In House “Inventions”

Each item in the list comes with a bit of explanation and an image or two where appropriate. There's definitely some things in here that are a bit debatable, but development has and will always have a file line between over-engineering and "just the right amount" of work. The trick is figuring out where that line is for your development work.