Terry Davis, working deep in his self-built operating system, often faced choices that every programmer knows well: use a clever trick, or stick to something plain and reliable.

One day, while coding a feature, he paused and asked aloud:

“Is this too much voodoo magic for our purposes?”

It was a humble, brilliant moment. Here was a man who could do anything with code — building a full OS from scratch — yet still asking if what he was doing made sense, or if it was just clever for clever’s sake.

The “voodoo magic” referred to code that works, but in strange, indirect, or opaque ways — hard to understand, hard to maintain. Maybe elegant. Maybe fragile.

And so Terry’s question became more than just a quip. It became a heuristic:

Is this simple enough?

Will someone else understand it — even future me?

Are we solving a problem, or just showing off?

For all his complexity, that one question shows Terry at his clearest: cutting through abstraction, chasing clarity, and reminding every coder that just because you can do something... doesn’t mean you should.

Sometimes, the real magic is keeping it simple