I was once accused of over-engineering a web banner. At the time, I was rather offended. Then, last week, I was looking at some truly inspiring work another developer did, and I caught myself thinking that he was over-engineering.

I think I was wrong.

If you create systems that make your day to day tasks easier or faster, surely that’s time well spent? If you write a piece of code that’s overly complex for the sake of being reusable, you haven’t really wasted your time, you just invested a lot of time now, in order to save time later.

The bottom line is this: I believe that over-engineering is perfectly fine if it’s justifiable. How you choose to justify it, is up to you.