In 1578, King Sebastian of Portugal vanished during a catastrophic battle. Despite evidence of his death, a myth persisted that he’d return to save the nation—a phenomenon dubbed Sebastianism. Centuries later, this same longing for a savior permeates engineering cultures, where teams chase singular technologies or methodologies as cure-alls, often at great cost. This isn’t merely "resume-driven development"; it’s a deeper, almost mythological hope that one framework, rewrite, or paradigm shift will resolve systemic chaos.

The Allure of the Silver Bullet

Engineers operate in complex, often disordered systems. When velocity slows, bottlenecks multiply, or technical debt mounts, the temptation arises to seek redemption in radical change:

  • The Spotify Model Mirage: One organization with 20+ teams adopted Spotify’s famed squad framework hoping for autonomy-driven velocity. Instead, teams fixated on how they worked rather than what they delivered. Feature progress stalled as process overshadowed outcomes.
  • Database Hopscotch: Another company cycled through three database engines in three years, convinced each migration would solve scaling woes. The core architectural constraints remained untouched, and scaling issues resurfaced—regardless of the persistence layer.
  • Immutable Infrastructure Dogma: A team rebuilt a non-cloud-native monitoring platform using immutable infrastructure, believing it would eradicate configuration drift. But because the platform relied on UI-driven configuration, drift became more likely, not less.

Why Sebastianism Fails

These "solutions" share a fatal flaw: they prioritize ideological purity over context. The Spotify model presumes mature, aligned teams; immutable infrastructure demands automation-first tooling. When applied indiscriminately, they create new problems:

# Symptom: Chasing Sebastian
if problem in ["slow_delivery", "scaling_issues", "config_drift"]:
    solution = adopt("trendy_framework")  # Often ignores root causes
    outcome = technical_debt += migration_cost + team_fatigue

"Be suspicious of rewrites, binary decisions, or advocations for wholesale change to solve specific problems. They are prayers for King Sebastian’s return." — Ashouri

The Incremental Alternative

The antidote is surgical precision:
1. Identify True Bottlenecks: Use observability tools to pinpoint where systems fail, not just that they fail.
2. Prioritize Targeted Fixes: Refactor a critical service; optimize a query; automate one deployment pipeline.
3. Measure Impact: Did velocity improve? Did incidents decrease? Iterate based on data.

Organizations that resist the siren song of Sebastianism realize that sustainable engineering isn’t about salvation—it’s about the quiet, persistent work of understanding and refining the system you have, not the myth you wish would save you.

Source: Waiting for King Sebastian by Ashouri