Comment by dalmo3

14 hours ago

Long rant, but the author never defines what he means by "simple". He heavily hints at smaller changeset == simpler.

Too often the smallest changeset is, yes, simple, but totally unaware of the surrounding context, breaks expectations and conventions, causes race conditions, etc.

The good bit in tfa is near the end:

> when someone asks “shouldn’t we future-proof this?”, don’t just cave and go add layers. Try: “Here’s what it would take to add that later if we need it, and here’s what it costs us to add it now. I think we wait.” You’re not pushing back, but showing you’ve done your homework. You considered the complexity and chose not to take it on.

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dalmo3

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skeeter2020  13 hours ago

I think Rich Hickey's talk about simple is great for defining these terms (literally). He describes how the roots of "simplex" mean single braid, which compares to the twisting & coupling with complexity; an apt visual for software development. He also differentiates simple/complex from easy/hard, which is important.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxdOUGdseq4

tetha  7 hours ago

I agree. I generally don't ask "Do we need to future proof this?", I rather ask: "Do we paint ourself into a corner?"

For example, if you implement a job framework of things calling a REST API to do stuff async, a sufficient first implementation is a simple monolith doing the stuff and some retries or periodic calls. Because, if it does not scale, we can start thinking about replacing that with something to put things into queues and scaling stuff-doers horizontally and such. But often enough, these simple things scale quite the distance.

On the other hand, if you start introducing in-memory caches into a singular instance to taper around database performance... that's a huge issue. That always leads to pain.

Additionally though, I"ve started to keep notes about people doing simple, efficient things without fanfare. This way, if my boss asks me what Bob did over the year, I can tell them that Bob made these problems disappear and how Bob is starting to handle this area of topics more and more. Suddenly Bob is growing responsible for this area, and if my boss asks Bob about these topics they did well in an annual review, Bob can shine. Hope they learn though.

vrosas  13 hours ago

> shouldn’t we future-proof this?

The answer to this is almost always "NO" in my experience, because no one ever actually has good suggestions when it comes up. It's never "should we choose a scalable compute/database platform?" It's always "should we build a complex abstraction layer in case we want to use multiple blob storage systems that will only contain the lowest common denominator of features of both AND require constant maintenance AND have weird bugs and performance issues because I think I'm smarter than AWS/Google AND ALSO we have no plans to actually DO that?"

/I'm not bitter...