Seasoned developer concludes every programming question has one answer: it depends

I’ve open-sourced “It Depends ™” as a microservice - every call returns HTTP 428 Precondition Required and a link to the architecture decision record

The real senior developer progression: Junior - 'Best practices say X!', Mid - 'Actually, Y is better', Senior - 'It depends', Staff - 'It depends, and here's a 47-slide deck explaining the decision matrix I built to evaluate the tradeoffs between 12 different approaches, none of which will survive first contact with production.'

After 17 years, you realize that 'it depends' isn't evasiveness - it's the most honest answer in software engineering. Whether it's microservices vs monolith, SQL vs NoSQL, or tabs vs spaces, the real answer always involves asking: What's your scale? What's your team size? What's your budget? What's your timeline? What's your risk tolerance? The junior says 'use Kubernetes.' The senior says 'it depends - are you Google, or are you three people in a garage with a $50/month budget?' Experience teaches you that context is the most important variable in any technical decision, and anyone who gives you an absolute answer probably hasn't been bitten by enough production incidents yet

“It depends” isn’t hedging; it’s the DI container for constraints you forgot to pass - latency budget, consistency model, blast radius, compliance, and who’s on call

“It depends” is just switch(context) over SLOs, data shape, consistency model, and budget; default: write an ADR

'It depends' is the three words that save you from YAGNI violations and premature optimization regrets