alt Hacker News> at least three quarters are boring boilerplate. And making that part interesting is one of the worst things you can do in software development! That path lies resume-driven development, architecture astronautics, abusing design patterns du jour, and other sins that will make code maintenance on that thing a nightmare!
You apparently see "making the boilerplate interesting" as doing a bunch of overengineering. Strange. To my mind, the overengineering is part of the boilerplate. "Making the boilerplate interesting" in my mind is not possible; but rather the goal is to fix the system such that it doesn't require boilerplate any more. (Sometimes that just means a different implementation language.)
I agree with what you said, but I think we might be talking about slightly different things. Let me give a few examples in an attempt to better explain myself:
A company I worked with a while ago had a microservices architecture, and have decided to not use one of a few standard API serialization/deserialization options, but write their own, because was going to be more performant, easier to maintain, better fit for their use case. A few years on, after having grown organically to support all the edge cases, it's more convoluted, slower, and buggy than if they went with the boring option that ostensibly had "a bit more boilerplate" from the start.
A second example is from a friend, whose coworker decided to write a backend-agnostic, purpose-agnostic, data-agnostic message broker/routing library. They spent a few months of this, delivered a beautifully architected solution in a few dozen k lines of code. The problem is the solution solves many problems the company didnt and wouldn't have, and will be a maintenance drag from then forevermore. Meanwhile, they could have done it in a few hundred lines of code that would be coupled to the problem domain, but still farily decend from most people's point of view.
These two are from real projects. But you can also notice that in general people are often picking a fancy solution over a boring one, ostensibly because it has something "out of the box". The price of the "out of the box"-ness (aside from potential SaaS/infra costs and vendor lock in), is that you now need to adapt your own code to work with the mental model (domain) of the fancy solution.
Or to harp on something trivial, you end up depending on left-pad because writing it yourself was boring.
> fix the system such that it doesn't require boilerplate any more.
I think perhaps I used a more broad meaning for "boilerplate" than you had in mind. If we're talking about boilerplate as enumerating all the exceptions a Java method may raise, or whatever unholy sad thing we have to do in C to use GTK/GObject, then I agree.
But I also meant something more closer to "glue code that isn't the primary carrier of value of the project", or to misuse financial language in this context, the code that's a cost center, not a profit center.