Adages collected over time

Simple is not given. It takes constant work There is no pride in managing or understanding complexity Typed languages are essential on teams with mixed experience levels Java is a great language because it’s boring Frontend development is a nightmare world of Kafkaesque awfulness I no longer enjoy Good management is invaluable. Objects are extremely good at what they’re good at. Blind devotion to functional is dumb. Engineering is mostly about communication If I think something is easy, that’s a sure sign I don’t understand it. Very few abstractions exist in general application development. Just write the code you need ORMs are the devil in all languages and all implementations. Just write the damn SQL Given a long enough time horizon, you’ll deeply regret building on Serverless Functions Types are assertions we make about the world Formal modeling and analysis is an essential skill set Isolation is the most important property of a good integration suite. DynamoDB is the worst possible choice for general application development Code coverage has absolutely nothing to do with code quality (in many cases, it’s inversely proportional) Monoliths remain pretty good It’s very hard to beat decades of RDBMS research and improvements Micro-services require justification (they’ve increasingly just become assumed) Most projects (even inside of AWS!) don’t need to “scale” and are damaged by pretending so 93%, maybe 95.2%, of project managers, could disappear tomorrow to either no effect or a net gain in efficiency. (this estimate is up from 4 years ago)

We are destroying software by no longer taking complexity into account when adding features or optimizing some dimension. We are destroying software with complex build systems. We are destroying software with an absurd chain of dependencies, making everything bloated and fragile. We are destroying software telling new programmers: “Don’t reinvent the wheel!”. But, reinventing the wheel is how you learn how things work, and is the first step to make new, different wheels. We are destroying software by no longer caring about backward APIs compatibility. We are destroying software pushing for rewrites of things that work. We are destroying software by always thinking that the de-facto standard for XYZ is better than what we can do, tailored specifically for our use case. We are destroying software claiming that code comments are useless. We are destroying software by making systems that no longer scale down: simple things should be simple to accomplish, in any system.

Inspiration, Soul Bodies

We are destroying software Developer philosophy @ Things Of Interest Software development topics I’ve changed my mind on after 10 years in the industry - Blogomatano