Years ago – I had a drawer full of old things. Old and cheap USB Cables that cap out at 1 mbps, 3.5mm extension cables long enough to traverse the moon, Magsafe connectors old enough to lay eggs, and way too many power cords from the legacy of monitors I used to buy.

The idea was simple: what if I need it?

A few months ago, I attended a session with an AWS veteran, who was telling us that we should always build for the present and plan for the future. The ideology here is that you will ever be perfect in terms of your infrastructure, and that your stack will hold up to a million concurrencies is a myth when it comes to things you are doing today as an MVP. It’s better to ship fast and fix them when they break, rather than to wait a year to release something too late even if it is ready for a million users.

Sure, you may disagree. But when you are on tight deadlines – it makes sense.

But it made sense for me in a lot of contexts too. I was holding onto a stack of assets that had not only expired their regular life-span, but also had no use to me at that point in time either. I was holding onto a dead stack and hoping that I would be able to use it in the future.

So I threw them away.

And the funny part is that it has been weeks since, and I haven’t needed any of those yet. And I now have space (bandwidth for tech teams) to get new stuff in for the next season!