I then lived for a few years in a house in a busy area again, and I decided I would move to a quieter place.

Without listing the subsequent steps, I eventually arrived at my current home, in a quiet area. But here I've come to know a new phenomenon. It doesn't just concern this place but, in general, all the non-urban places I've frequented in recent years: the constant use of cars for laughable distances.

Saturday afternoon, with a bit of peace and 30 degree Celsius weather, I lay down on my bed for a bit after lunch, intending to rest a little, with the window open. The Azores High, increasingly rare in Italy lately (the African anticyclone, much more humid and hot, has been dominant in recent years), gave that sense of peace. I could hear the late spring birdsong, the warm air caressing my hai... er... face, the peace of a Saturday afternoon. All of this was continually interrupted by car noises.

I went to the window to watch and noticed that, in the end, it was the same 3 or 4 cars constantly passing back and forth. Many of my neighbours, like many residents in small towns, take the car even to go 200 meters.

And I remembered a time, a few years ago, when I made a sort of bet with my father-in-law: my wife and I would walk from his house to the pizzeria (a few hundred meters away) while he would drive. He went out, got into his car, and only then did we set off. We arrived at the door, and he was still maneuvering to park.

I wonder: why have people in small towns, or generally outside large cities, developed this dependence on cars even for minimal journeys? Is it habit? A perceived lack of alternatives? Laziness? A status symbol?

Many of them, when I've brought up the subject, couldn't give an answer. Perhaps in small towns, thanks to the ease of parking, there's still that very 20th-century philosophy of "only those who can't afford a car walk". But I'm not sure.

What makes me smile is that often people who live outside the city do so for peace and fresh air... and then they pollute and make noise just to go a hundred meters from home.

Sometimes, human beings are truly curious creatures to study.

Classical Style

Typical Reaction:

"Too ornate! So outdated! Nobody wants this old-fashioned stuff full of frills anymore!"

"Look at all these useless objects! It's so... maximalist!"

"Impossible to keep clean! Who has time to dust all those details?"

Minimalist Style

Typical Reaction:

"So elegant! Modern and functional!"

"True beauty lies in simplicity!"

"Finally a space where the mind can breathe!"

WEB ARCHITECTURE

Simple Traditional Stack

┌───────────────┐
│    Browser    │
└───────┬───────┘
        │
        ▼
┌───────────────┐
│    Firewall   │
└───────┬───────┘
        │
        ▼
┌───────────────┐
│   Web server  │
└───────┬───────┘
        │
        ▼
┌───────────────┐
│   HTML/CSS    │
│     Files     │
└───────────────┘

Typical Reaction:

"Too simple! That's so 2010!"

"Not scalable! How do you handle thousands of users?"

"Where's the DevOps? And CI/CD? What about serverless?"

"It's not resilient/reliable/cloud-native enough!"

Complex Modern Stack

┌─────────────────┐    ┌─────────────┐    ┌──────────────────┐
│    CDN Edge     │◄───┤ DNS Manager ├────┤ DDOS Protection  │
└────────┬────────┘    └─────────────┘    └──────────────────┘
         │
         ▼
┌────────────────┐    ┌──────────────┐
│  Load Balancer ├────┤ Auto-scaling │
└────────┬───────┘    └──────────────┘
         │
         ▼
┌────────────────┐
│     Proxy      │
└────────┬───────┘
         │
         ▼
┌────────────────┐    ┌──────────────┐    ┌──────────────────┐
│   Kubernetes   ├────┤ Service Mesh ├────┤ Circuit Breaker  │
└────────┬───────┘    └──────────────┘    └──────────────────┘
         │
         ▼
┌────────────────┐    ┌──────────────┐    ┌──────────────────┐
│  Microservices ├────┤Message Queue ├────┤   Redis Cache    │
└────────┬───────┘    └──────────────┘    └──────────────────┘
         │
         ▼
┌────────────────┐    ┌──────────────┐    ┌──────────────────┐
│      API       ├────┤ Auth Service ├────┤  User Service    │
└────────┬───────┘    └──────────────┘    └──────────────────┘
         │
         ▼
┌────────────────┐    ┌──────────────┐    ┌──────────────────┐
│    Database    ├────┤   Sharding   ├────┤  Backup System   │
└────────┬───────┘    └──────────────┘    └──────────────────┘
         │
         ▼
┌────────────────┐    ┌──────────────┐    ┌──────────────────┐
│   Monitoring   ├────┤   Logging    ├────┤    Alerting      │
└────────────────┘    └──────────────┘    └──────────────────┘

                * To serve a text page with 5 users per day *

Typical Reaction:

"Such an elegant architecture! So professional!"

"Finally a modern, well-designed approach!"

"This is the right way to do things today!"

"Excellent cloud-native implementation! Beautiful diagram!"

The Contradiction

• In interior design: "Less is more! Simplify!"

• In web development: "More is better! Complicate!"

Does a simple landing page really need Kubernetes?

Conclusion

Perhaps it's time to reassess what "modernity" truly means and consider the real purpose of what we're creating.