The 4S Philosophy Compass

Why Long Term Philosophy?

The common mantra in software development is “short time to market.” This is often achieved through plugins and frameworks. While speed to market can be economically critical, it frequently leads to significant challenges and costs later. Based on my experience, I have revised my philosophy to prioritize long-term thinking, with maintainability as the foundation.

Too often, the focus on development speed overshadows resource efficiency and the looming risk of dependency hell. Version maintenance issues can consume more time than the initial build. To avoid this trap, I created my 4S compass to guide me in every choice in my Gopher journey.

1. Simplicity

Simplicity has many layers: development, deployment, maintenance, even marketing. External libraries and frameworks may simplify development at first, but their hidden “magic” often complicates maintenance. A new version can break your code overnight. My philosophy: keep things simple enough to understand and maintain without relying on magic abstractions.

2. Security

Security has two faces. The first is physical safety — firewalls, proxies, and hiding assets. In my case, I test the "Safe Box Method", isolating sensitive services behind internal IPs. The second is logical safety — encryption and obfuscation to make data harder to misuse.”

3. Speed

Speed matters not only for user experience but also for sustainability. Faster apps consume fewer resources, reduce traffic, and lower environmental impact. I prioritize local solutions — localhost and internal IPs — to minimize overhead and maximize efficiency.

4. Sustainability

Sustainability means evaluating every choice by its footprint: speed, memory, resource usage. Smaller and faster is greener and cheaper. Even UI design plays a role — a simpler interface reduces navigation time, saving energy and improving efficiency. Sustainability is not just about servers; it is about the entire lifecycle of interaction.

Lesson learned: Guidelines makes it esiear to make consistent choices.