Jason McCreary has written up a post covering a popular topic from the eXtreme programming world, a talk he presented on the subject and a bit of his own personal experiences with it: YAGNI or "You Aren’t Gonna Need It".

Last week I spoke at Laracon US 2016 about Practicing YAGNI. First, let me say it was an honor to present for such a large audience at such a premiere conference. I received a lot of feedback and interest in my talk. To that point, many people have asked me to share my slides. As the slides were mostly placeholders for discussion, I felt a blog post would better summarize the talk.

[...] YAGNI is a principle of eXtreme Programming - something I practice daily at work. YAGNI is an acronym for You Aren’t Gonna Need It. It states a programmer should not add functionality until deemed necessary. In theory, this seems straightforward, but few programmers practice it.

He talks about practicing YAGNI and why it's hard for the average developer. He starts with the overall problem it solves and the more relatable KISS (Keep it simple, stupid) and MVP (minimum viable product) realms of thought. He then gets into some of the ways that you can practice YAGNI in your own development, mostly dealing with the timing of feature development rather than complexity. He also includes some times when it doesn't make sense to practice YAGNI and, finally, what practicing it means to him personally.