Finally, we've made it to our third and final design choice: KISS. A vital skill for all web developers is to understand when certain optimizations and refactors are necessary, and when it simply doesn't matter. In the case of this particular feature, would it be easier if we simply added a "visits" column to our threads table? Yes, we'd need to increment this count each time a thread is read, but is that necessarily a problem? Are we anticipating a scale and level of traffic that demands such an optimization? If not, keep it simple.

View the source code for this episode on GitHub.