This is the experienced developers dilemma: "To engineer or to not engineer"; engineering usually turning out to be over engineering. A more experienced developer friend of mine would always tell me: "build for today's requirements". I try hard to fight the design/architect voices in my head that always want to imagine this made up future where we will need X or else we cannot go live. These voices usually only stall real actual work, instill fear, and serve very little to no purpose.

I once had an argument with a Wall Street Java developer who was made the "lead" of one of our team projects. He decreed that every single class have an interface so that we can be generic and not tightly couple any of the components to concrete classes. I agreed that in some instances where functionality, i.e. methods that can be represented by different classes with the same method signatures made sense but not every single class needs an interface (if that is the case just go with a beautiful dynamically typed language like Python and avoid the code bloat). He got management on his side and we went off and built an overly engineered Straight Through Processing solution. It was a sheer nightmare to debug and the code bloat made me scream one day when we had a serious production issue. Even our manager (who finally had to look at the code when most of us were out on vacation once to answer some user questions) was flabbergasted at the amount of code he had to read through in order to answer the most trivial of questions. One extreme example was an interface for trade references. Our trade references were always strings with a date and some numeric value concatenated to it. The "engineer" decided that we needed an interface for this and added one interface and concrete class for our trade references. I told him that all classes needing trade references instance variables could just have a String instance variable named tradeReference or something like that and he went on to give me a design pattern lecture. We argued for nearly 20 minutes about this silly thing as he kept insisting that the future was unknown so we have to future proof the code from unforeseeable changes. When he said this I asked him to remove the Crystal ball plugin he had in Eclipse for predicting the future and get real. He got angry and we had a team call to waste yet another hour of developer time to discuss this. In the call I mentioned that our trade references scheme had not changed in 8 years and was unlikely to change... I lost the debate anyway. The ratio for most of the code base from interface to concrete class was largely 1-1 thus not justifying this code bloat approach.

Experienced developers (at least I think) seem to have these crystal balls in their heads or IDEs and usually try to be clairvoyant when it comes down to building a product. We need to get out of the business of overly engineering and just do as my friend said: "build for today's requirements". It is called software for a reason: it is soft. It can change (most likely will), can be refactored, redesigned, and/or incrementally made better or more abstract to accommodate changes. I am in no way saying no design, just limit it and get to work. A successfully built product is more satisfying then the imaginations of your head and the "perfect" engineering/scaling solution that never materializes. Users will like you, you will like you, and the team will get an andrenaline boost with each and every release keeping the spirits high. Remove the Crystal ball plugin from your head/IDE and stop trying to be clairvoyant and be a developer.