The author reflects on their experience with a greenfield project in 2016 where they implemented new technologies such as serverless, event sourcing, and functional programming. However, they soon realized that the increased complexity of these new tools led to an excessive amount of "glue code" - repetitive tasks needed to connect different components together. The author believes that this trend is on the rise due to the increasing popularity of smaller and more specialized components, which leads to a higher surface area between components. This results in a decrease in productivity and an increase in maintenance costs. The author proposes the term "surface area" to describe these tasks and suggests that reducing the cost of surface area should be a priority over creating larger components. They also mention that serverless technologies can help alleviate this problem, but more work is needed to make it easier to manage surface area.