I just love the deliberate design of this little square of silicon. When I work with it, I can see how smart people thought hard about the niche the RP2040 is in and drove the tradeoffs accordingly. As an engineer aspiring to be good someday, I appreciate it.
Article
In this article, the author discusses how the limited (read none) configuration options of the RP2040 chip has actually led to it's widespread adoption in a variety of electronics projects.
This is a great example of using restrictions to create a better singular solution to a problem than would have been created if you allowed for multiple solutions. Also a great real-life application of the 80/20 rule.
A lot of times, people tend towards thinking that "More is Better" especially in situations where the cost of creating more is negligible. But in a lot of situations "Less Is More". By choosing to create a solution that satisfices (s/o to Rory Sutherland) they were able to allow for the creation of a community with learning resources around this microcontroller and all the benefits that come along with it.
Software Devs (especially in the age of AI) easily fall for the "More is Better" fallacy. New edge case you didn't think of, no worries, I'll just add more code. The real fix would be to sit back and come up with the right abstraction that could gracefully handle edge cases you can't think of in the moment.
Remember, Less Is More.
Thanks for reading and as always, all comments, critiques and questions are highly appreciated. Here's a link to the
previous article response.
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