The Hidden Cost of Complexity: Reducing Cognitive Load in Python

Some codebases let you ship a change in minutes. Others turn a one-line fix into weeks of investigation.

The difference is often not skill, tooling, or even architecture—it’s cognitive load.

In this talk, we’ll look at real examples from long-lived Python systems to understand how inheritance, deep nesting, excessive abstraction, microservices, and over-applied DRY silently increase the cost of change.

You’ll learn practical heuristics to recognize high cognitive load early and concrete strategies to reduce it—so your team can move faster without rewriting everything.

This is a pragmatic engineering talk for developers who work in real production code, not greenfield demos.