Episode 80: How Is a Big Project Different from a Small One?

In this episode of the Acima Development Podcast, Mike hosts a roundtable with Eddy, Dave, Chloe, Jordan, Ramses, and later Will, to explore the differences between small and large projects. Mike kicks things off with a personal story about industrial dishwashing as a teenager and how that shifted his perspective on “small” problems like doing dishes at home. He ties this to software by noting that scale fundamentally changes how you approach problems, whether that’s navigating your neighborhood versus traveling cross-country, or building a small app versus managing a complex, multi-team system. The theme: what works at one scale may feel trivial or even inadequate at another. The conversation then moves into real-world engineering trade-offs. Dave contrasts working in application development versus database engineering, where different constraints (compute vs. storage) flip what’s considered efficient. Eddy stresses the importance of incremental, low-risk changes in large systems, while Chloe shares how her internship taught her that upfront design decisions carry far more weight in big projects than in small, flexible ones. Will and others riff on the “temptation of perfection”—the idea that if you just planned enough, you’d get everything right upfront. Instead, they argue for agile approaches: accept mistakes as inevitable, design for change, and value rework as part of progress. Several panelists tie this to the importance of embracing ignorance, asking “stupid” questions, and adopting a growth mindset to avoid paralysis when decisions inevitably prove imperfect. The group also digs into the human dimension of scale: coordination. Jordan notes that large projects require consensus and approvals, whereas small projects let you move unilaterally. Mike reframes bureaucracy as a natural outcome of needing structured communication and shared understanding, not just red tape. Dave and Will debate decision-making heuristics—how long to defer choices, what counts as “enough information,” and how to balance planning versus execution. They conclude that small projects build the fundamental skills and intuition needed for larger systems, while big projects demand humility, adaptability, and collaboration. Ultimately, the episode emphasizes that success isn’t about perfect planning but about making good-enough decisions, coordinating effectively with others, and being willing to course-correct as conditions change. Transcript: MIKE: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Acima Development Podcast. I'm Mike, and I'm hosting again today. With me, I've got Eddy, Jordan, Dave, Chloe, and Ramses. Now, Jordan and Chloe are our interns. You all were on before, right [chuckles]? CHLOE: Yeah. MIKE: So, it's not the first time. It's not the first time here. But today is the last day of the internship that we had for this summer. And as a result, we're choosing a topic that I thought would be really relevant, something that we've talked about some with the interns, if they can give us some insight as to what they've learned. And having somebody new on a problem often reveals things that other people don't see. That's why sometimes grad students make good teachers [chuckles]. They're fresh to it, you know, they haven't been so distanced. So, I'm really interested in hearing about this. Notice I haven't mentioned the topic yet. I'm going to give a little intro to introduce here. And I'm going to talk about a summer in my teen years where I worked at a Mexican restaurant [laughs] washing dishes, not just washing dishes. They also made me a prep cook and I heated up, like, beans [laughs]. But I washed a lot of dishes, and this was, you know, industrial dish washing. You can imagine what the pans looked like after they've been cooking whatever Mexican food they were cooking [laughs]. Just imagine, you're probably right. EDDY: Did you use a pressure hose? It's probably the best way to clean dishes, especially large dishes. MIKE: So, we had two things that happened. So, there was the customer dishes that came in, and those we had a big industrial dishwasher that we kind of did a conveyor belt style. You’d load them in, and they’d go in there, and they’d steam, and spray a bunch of water, and that worked pretty well. Except if you have, like, cheeseburgers, you know, cheese would melt onto it and stick to the plates [laughs]. I see Chloe smiling. She may have done this before [laughs]. And on the other side of the area where we did the washing, there was a series of three sinks, and that's where all of the stuff from the cooks, right, that's where that stuff would get cleaned. And that was the gnarly stuff. And a pressure hose...there was nothing that would take gunk off a pan when it first came over. And this wasn't, like, very authentic Mexican food [laughs]. They had, like, I don't know if it was blackened, you know, Cajun, but along those lines kind of fish that they would do. And they...