To my mind, "minimal" means "only what's needed" or "enough"
I think "minimal" is a word that often has negative connotations so I think it's important to explain what it means to me, to ensure my intention is not misunderstood. To my mind, "minimal" means "only what's needed" or "enough". It's "satisfied", a balance between deprivation and excess. Immediately you can see a difficulty, the gray area: who's to say what's "enough"? As with everything, it depends: it depends on the person, the people, the situation.
I wonder if this ease, this new convenience, of grabbing things off the shelf, also creates some of our problems
I think the open-source movement, especially in the last 10-20 years, has had a massive, and incredibly positive, impact on the way we do things. Excellent code, knowledge, experience, is freely shared, reused. Progress is made. But I wonder if this ease, this new convenience, of grabbing things off the shelf, also creates some of our problems. It's easy to reach for our favourite general-purpose framework or one-size-fits-all CMS, but that won't always be the optimal choice for a project, not in terms of its carbon footprint, say. You wouldn't hire an excavator to plant your tomatoes—would you? Likewise, Symfony Framework would be somewhat overpowered to run a simple, largely static, single-page website, for example. I'm a fan of Symfony but I couldn't justify using it in every project. The same goes for everything else.
The internet is a big place: a huge amount of energy, for one thing, could be saved if we all exercised just a little restraint here and there
I'm not suggesting we effectively regress and always write only what we need: I simply think there are times we could be a little more judicious in our choices, and I think there's a place for less in many cases. "General purpose" necessarily implies a degree of excess in some situations. I don't think we always need more features: sometimes the basics are enough. The internet is a big place: a huge amount of energy, for one thing, could be saved if we all exercised just a little restraint here and there. I think that position offers some reassurance: I think there's some hope in that.