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Comment by TeMPOraL

12 hours ago

I have my own take on this; I was meaning to write a blog post about it to "coin" the terms, but might as well do it here. My philosophy and attitude related to writing and using software have, in the past years, developed into distinct set of methodologies. There's "maintenance minimization engineering" aspect to creating products, but as a user/prosumer, I have a different approach:

Bypass-Driven Development: making progress by routing around obstructive abstractions instead of integrating on their preferred terms.

Motivating thought: often enough you already have all the pieces to solve your problem, and have legitimate right to use them, yet those pieces refuse to talk directly with each other because of a mix of technical and business reasons. API boundaries, OAuth walls that invite getting additional vendors (identity providers) involved for no good reason, platform purposefully preventing interoperability, enshittification, lack of "business need" to integrate - or worse, having a business need which means integration suddenly involves you being a third party to a contract between two service providers.

There's no technical limitation to prevent this, but I've noticed people started taking abstraction layers, API boundaries and "intended use" as holy writ, and assume you can't do something because "it's not how it's supposed to work".

BDD is my claim that an abstraction which obstructs a legitimate goal forfeits its right to be respected.

Subpattern of this, Bypass in Anger (BIA), when routing around becomes routing through. Evocative example: modern soldiers navigating dense urban environment by ignoring it entirely, and moving in straight lines, just blowing holes in any walls that are between them and their destination. That is my answer to when "the computer says no".

Kinda a pragmatic blend of Adversarial Interoperabiltiy/ComCom, "computational self-determination", good ol' hacker ethos, and a counterpoint to "security maximalist" doctrine that runs modern computing, with a hefty dose of defiant "you are not going to tell me what I can or cannot do with my data on my computer".