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fogleman
lkglglgllm
Wngman.
Number of softwares not supporting iso8601, TODAY (no pun), is appalling. For example, git (claiming compatibility, but isn’t).
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tormeh
It's an infuriatingly accurate sketch. A team should usually have responsibility for no more than one service. There are many situations where this is not possible or desired (don't force your kafka connect service into your business logic service), but it's the ideal, IMO. More services mean more overhead. But someone read a blog post somewhere and suddenly we have four microservices per dev. Fun times.
bitwize
This is the kind of situation you get into when you let programmers design the business information systems, rather than letting systems analysts design the software systems.
QuercusMax
I don't think I've ever worked on a project that had "system analysts". You might as well say "this is what happens when you don't allow sorcerers to peer into the future". Best I've ever had are product managers who maybe have a vague idea of what the customer wants.
bitwize
Well, that's just the problem, innit. In decades past, systems analysts performed a vital function, viewing the business and understanding its information flows as a whole and determining what information systems needed to be implemented or improved. Historically, in well-functioning information-systems departments, the programmer's job was confined to implementation only. Programming was just a translation step, going from human requirements to machine readable code.
Beginning in about the 1980s or so, with the rise of PCs and later the internet, the "genius programmer" was lionized and there was a lot of money to be made through programming alone. So systems analysts were slowly done away with and programmers filled that role. These days the systems analyst as a separate profession is, as you say, nearly extinct. The programmers who replaced the analysts applied techniques and philosophies from programming to business information analysis, and that's how we got situations like with Bingo, WNGMAN, and Galactus. Little if any business analysis was done, the program information flows do not mirror the business information flows, and chaos reigns.
In reality, 65% of the work should be in systems analysis and design—well before a single line of code is written. The actual programming takes up maybe 15% of the overall work. And with AI, you can get it down to maybe a tenth that: using Milt Bryce's PRIDE methodology for systems analysis and development will yield specs that are precise enough to serve as context that an LLM can use to generate the correct code with few errors or hallucinations.
wavemode
No, this is the situation you get into when you have programmers build a system, the requirements of that system change 15 times over the course of 15 years, and then you never give those programmers time to go back and redesign, so they keep having to stack new hacks and kludges on top of the old hacks and kludges.
Anyone who has worked at a large company has encountered a Galactus, that was simply never redesigned into a simple unified service because doing so would sideline other work considered higher priority.
nullorempty
> You can't design software you don't work on
In 30 years in software dev, I am yet to see any significant, detailed and consistent effort to be extended into design and architecture. Most architects do not design, do not architect.
Senior devs design and architect and then take their design to the architects for *feedback and approvals*.
These senior devs make designs for features and only account for code and systems they've been exposed to.
With an average employment term of 2 years most are exposed to a small cut of the system, which affects the depth and correctness of their design.
And architects mostly approve, sometimes I think without even reading the docs.
At most, you can expect the architects to give generic advice and throw a few buzzwords.
At large, they feel comfortable and secure in their positions and mostly don't give a shit!
WillAdams
John Ousterhout has been addressing this one class at a time at Stanford for a while now, and has scaled up to a book:
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/39996759-a-philosophy...
Video overview at:
octorian
The last time I worked on a project that actually had all these roles, "architect" basically meant someone who sat in meetings all day and played very little role in the actual software development of the project.
There were plenty of times where it would have been useful to have someone providing real architecture/design guidance, but no such person functionally existed.
rvba
There are those comedians who talk with people in IT (mostly various types of roasts). People laugh, but it is incredibly sad that for example someone from the Android team does not use an android phone for a daily driver.
Microsoft had a lot of sins, but at least they asked the coders to eat own dogfood.
Also the "2 year coding wizards" that you described usually dont live up to see the results (or rather: disasters) of their decisions + they dont have to maintain their own code.
MomsAVoxell
>Eat your own dog food
The end.
makeitdouble
> 2 years
I've been thinking about this a lot. 2~3 years is a long time, long enough to have a pretty good grasp on what a code maintained by 50~100 does in pretty concrete terms, come up with decent improvement ideas, and see at least one or two structural ideas hit production.
If the person then stays 1 or 2 more years they get a chance to further refine, but usually will be moved up the ladder Peter Principle style. If they get a chance to lead these architecture changes that company has a chance to be on a decent path technally speaking.
I'm totally with you on the gist of it: architects will usually be a central switch arranging these ideas coming from more knowledgeable places. In the best terms I see their role as guaranteeing consistency and making sure teams don't impede each other's designs.
mmis1000
> 2 years
I feel it's already enough to rewrite a big part of subsystem or change the whole thing into shit (depends on maintainer).
Software today moves quite fast. 2 year is sometimes difference between a new company and a dead company
skydhash
"Generic Software Design" as the author called it, is nice for setting the general direction of some implementation. This is why I like to read software engineering books. It's easier to solve a problem if you have some kind of framing to guide you. And it's easier to talk about the solution if everyone share the same terminology.
But yes, the map is not the territory, and giving directions is not the same as walking the trail. The actual implementation can deviate from the plan drafted at the beginning of the project. A good explanation is found in Naur's Theory of Programming, where he says the true knowledge of the system is inside the head of the engineers that worked on it. And that knowledge is not easily transferrable.
DerArzt
Man I would kill for some direction from my "architects", even if it were a bit wrong. I'm at the point that I can't even get them to review my architectural diagrams demanded by my company to guide me on what's expected.
eviks
> For instance: In large codebases, consistency is more important than “good design”
But this is exactly the type of generic software design advice the article warns us about! And it mostly results in all all the bad software practices we as users know and love remaining unchanged (consistently "bad" is better than being good at least in some areas!)
johnfn
I don’t know. At my place a lot of cowboy engineers decided to do things their own way. So now we have the random 10k lines written in Redux (not used anywhere else) that no one likes working with. Then there’s the part that randomly uses some other query library because they didn’t like the one we use in 95% of the code for some reason, so if you ever want to work with that code you need to keep two libraries in your head instead of one. Yes, the existing query library is out of date. Yes, the new one is better— in isolation. But having both is even worse than having the bad one!
whstl
GP is talking about "consistently bad" being worse than "inconsistently good". Not defending any inconsistency.
What you describe just sounds "inconsistent AND bad".
johnfn
I didn’t really get into it, but I think that most decisions which are not consistent are made with some feeling of “I will improve upon the existing state of this ugly codebase by introducing Good Decisions”. I’m sure even the authors of the Redux section of my code felt the same way. But code with two competing standards, only one good, is almost always worse than code with one bad standard. So breaking with consistency must be carefully considered, and the developers must have the drive to push their work forward rather than just leaving behind an isle of goodness.
yunnpp
The author never really defines "consistency" anyway. Consistency of what?
I've never seen consistency of libraries and even programming languages have a negative impact. Conversely, the situation you describe, or even going out of the way to use $next_lang entirely, is almost always a bad idea.
The consistency of where to place your braces is important within a given code base and teams working on it, but not that important across them, because each one is internally consistent. Conversely, two code bases and teams using two DBs that solve the same problem is likely not a good idea because now you have two types of DBs to maintain. Also, if one team solves a DB-specific problem, say, a performance issue, it might not be obvious how the other team might be able to pick up the results of that work and benefit from it.
So I don't know. I think the answer depends on how you define "consistency", which OP hasn't done very well.
roguecoder
This is where an architect is useful, because they can ask "why?"
Sometimes there is a reason! Sometimes there isn't a reason, but it might be something we want to move everything over to if it works well and will rip out if it doesn't. Sometimes it's just someone who believes that functional programming is Objectively Better, and those are when an architect can say "nope, you don't get to be anti-social."
The best architects will identify some hairy problem that would benefit from those skills and get management to point the engineer in that direction instead.
A system that requires homogeneity to function is limited in the kinds of problems it can solve well. But that shouldn't be an excuse to ignore our coworkers (or the other teams: I've recently been seeing cowboy teams be an even bigger problem than cowboy coders.)
benoau
Ugh I remember a "senior" full stack dev coming to me with various ideas for the backend - start use typeorm instead of sequelize and replace nestjs with express, for the tickets they would work on, despite having no experience with any of these. The mess of different libraries and frameworks they left in the frontend will haunt that software for years lol.
shayway
It's essentially the same problem as https://xkcd.com/927/ [How Standards Proliferate]
eviks
So following that silly comic you'd ban utf-8 because it breaks consistency? (even though in reality it beat most other standards, not just became 15th)
jpollock
This isn't really about software quality, it's about the entire organization.
Consistency enables velocity. If there is consistency, devs can start to make assumptions. "Auth is here, database is there, this is how we handle ABC". Possible problems show up in reviews by being different to expectation. "Hey, where's XYZ?", "Why are you querying the database in the constructor?"
Onboarding between teams becomes a lot easier, ramp up time is smaller.
Without consistency, you end up with lots of small pockets of behavior that cause downstream problems for the org as a whole.
Every team needs extra staff to handle load peaks, resulting in a lot of idle devs.
Senior devs can't properly guess where the problematic parts of fixes or features would be. They don't need to know the details, just where things will be _difficult_.
Every feature requires coordination between the teams, with queuing and prioritizing until local staff become available.
Finally, consistency allows classes of bugs to be fixed once. Fix it once and migrate everyone to the new style.
karmakaze
Yeah that line gave me a twitch. Reading on though it's more about the resulting coherence and correctness rather than like the Ralph Waldo Emerson quote: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines."
kayo_20211030
I agree. It's only the foolish consistency that's problematic. A sensible consistency does, as you say, provide a coherence. William James, who overlapped Emerson, has a lot to say about positive habits.
snoman
My reading of it also violates the Boy Scout Rule. That is to say: if improving some portion of the codebase would make it better, but inconsistent, you should avoid the improvement; which is something that I would disagree with.
I think adherence to “consistency is more important than ‘good design’” naturally leads to boiling the ocean refactoring and/or rewrites, which are far riskier endeavors with lower success rates than iterative refactoring of a working system over time.
jpollock
If improving a portion of the codebase makes it better, but inconsistent...
migrate the rest of the codebase!
Then everyone benefits from the discovery.
If that's difficult, write or find tooling to make that possible.
It's in the "if it hurts, do it more often" school of software dev.
https://martinfowler.com/bliki/FrequencyReducesDifficulty.ht...
CuriouslyC
The problem with small refactors over time is that your information about what constitutes a good/complete model of your system increases over time as you understand customers and encounter edge cases. Small refactors over time can cause architectural churn and bad abstractions. Additionally, if you ever want to do a programmatic rewrite of code, with a bunch of small refactors that becomes more difficult, with a single surface you can sometimes just use a macro to change everything all at once.
This is an example of a premature optimization. The reason it can still be good is that large refactors are an art that most people haven't suffered enough to master. There are patterns to make it tractable, but it's riskier and engineers often aren't personally invested in their codebases enough to bother over just fixing the few things that personally drive them nuts.
strogonoff
If improving some portion of the codebase would make it better, but inconsistent, you should avoid the improvement. Take note, file a ticket, make a quick branch, and get back to what you were working on; later implement that improvement across the whole codebase as its own change, keeping things consistent.
johnbcoughlin
if you have some purported improvement to a codebase that would make it inconsistent, then it's a matter of taste, not fact, whether it is actually an improvement.
Night_Thastus
Consistency is best, with a slow gradual, measured movement towards 'better' where possible. When and where the opportunity strikes.
If you see a massive 50 line if/else/if/else block that can be replaced with a couple calls to std::minmax, in code that you are working on, why not replace it?
But don't go trying to rewrite everything at once. Little improvements here or there whenever you touch the code. Look for the 'easy wins' which are obvious based on more modern approaches. Don't re-write already well-written code into a new form if it doesn't benefit anything.
Waterluvian
I feel like “be consistent” is a rule that applies very broadly.
There’s absolutely exceptions and nuances. But I think when weighing trade-offs, program makers by and large deeply under-weigh being consistent.
Sankozi
I have opposite experience. Consistency is commonly enforced in bigger corporations while it's value is not that high (often negative). Lots of strategies/patterns promoted and blindly followed without a brief reflection that maybe this is a bad solution for certain problems. TDD, onion/hexagonal architecture, SPA, React, etc.
pydry
Moreover, saying that consistency is more important than good design is like saying that eating leafy greens is more important than a good diet.
tonyhart7
Yeah its called the expectations, consistently bad is predictable
software that has "good" and "bad" parts in unpredictable
whstl
> software that has "good" and "bad" parts in unpredictable
Software that has only "bad" parts is also very unpredictable.
(Unless "bad" means something else than "bad", it's hard to keep up with the lingo)
tonyhart7
that's why I write the first parts of my comment
your example is just bad code that unpredictable
redrove
So we should all write bad code to keep it predictable? raising the quality of the codebase is unacceptable under this premise.
evilduck
Possibly. Probably even.
High quality and consistent > Low quality and consistent > Variable quality and inconsistent. If you're going to be the cause of the regression into variable quality and inconsistent you'd better deliver on bringing it back up to high quality and consistent. That's a lot of work that most people aren't cut out for because it's usually not a technical change but a cultural change that's needed. How did a codebase get into the state of being below standards? How are you going to prevent that from happening again? You are unlikely to Pull Request your way out of that situation.
tonyhart7
"So we should all write bad code to keep it predictable?"
its true and false at the same time, it depends
here I can bring example: you have maintaining production system that has been run for years
there is flaw in some parts of codebase that is probably ignored either because
1. bad implementation/hacky way
2. the system outgrow the implementation
so you try to "fix" it but suddenly other internal tools stops working, customer contact the support because it change the behaviour on their end, some CI randomly fails etc
software isn't exist in a vacuum, complex interaction sometimes prevent "good" code to exist because that just reality
I don't like it either but this is just what it is
jkaptur
There are two extremes here: first, the "architects" that this article rails against. Yes, it's frustrating when a highly-paid non-expert swoops in to offer unhelpful or impossible advice.
On the other hand, there are Real Programmers [0] who will happily optimize the already-fast initializer, balk at changing business logic, and write code that, while optimal in some senses, is unnecessarily difficult for a newcomer (even an expert engineer) to understand. These systems have plenty of detail and are difficult to change, but the complexity is non-essential. This is not good engineering.
It's important to resist both extremes. Decision makers ultimately need both intimate knowledge of the details and the broader knowledge to put those details in context.
7402
> if you come up with the design for a software project, you ought to be responsible for the project’s success or failure
I think this should also apply to people who come up with or choose the software development methodology for a project. Scrum masters just don't have the same skin in the game that lead engineers do.
ilaksh
This is also the type of thing that makes having separate software architects that aren't actually maintaining the software generally a nonsensical idea.
There are too many decisions, technical details, and active changes to have someone come in and give direction from on high at intervals.
Maybe at the beginning it could make sense sort of, but projects have to evolve and more often than not discover something important early on in the implementation or when adding "easy" features, and if someone is good at doing software design then you may need them even more at that point. But they may easily be detrimental if they are not closely involved and following the rest of the project details.
o_nate
I guess I'm lucky not to have worked at a place with a role for software architects who don't actually write code. I honestly don't know how that would work. However, I think I can appreciate the author's point. Any sufficiently complex piece of existing software is kind of like a chess game in progress. There is a place for general principles of chess strategy, but once the game is going, general strategy is much less relevant than specific insights into the current state of play, and a player would probably not appreciate advice from someone who has read a lot of chess books but hasn't looked at the current state of the board.
roguecoder
The best "architects" serve as facilitators, rather than deciding themselves how software is built. They have to be reading the code, but they don't themselves have to be coding to be effective.
You don't need one until you've got 30-70 engineers, but a strong group of collaborative architects is the most important thing for keeping software development effective and efficient at the 30-1,000 engineer range.
Sankozi
"In large codebases, consistency is more important than “good design”" - this is completely opposite from my experience. There is some value in consistency within single module but consistency in a large codebase is a big mistake (unless in extremely rare case that code base consists entirely of very similar modules).
Modules with different requirements should not have single consistent codebase. Testing strategy, application architecture, even naming should be different across different modules.
augustk
In the best scenario the developers are also active users of the software they produce. Then a design flaw or an error that affects the users will also affect the developers and will (hopefully) motivate the latter to correct it.
octorian
Its also useful for developers to have a way of bypassing customer support to have direct visibility into what issues the actual users are experiencing. This can come in the form of browsing tickets, online forums, or social media.
Often something that's easily brushed off by a support rep will ring a bell in the mind of a developer who has recently worked in the area of the code related to the issue.
roguecoder
XP putting a customer on the team was the best thing in the methodology. Replacing those with business representatives is one of Scrum's original sins.
bitwize
> XP putting a customer on the team was the best thing in the methodology.
Recently my boss said to me: "Customers want something that WORKS. If you deliver something, and it doesn't work, what's the customer going to think?" The huge drawback to putting a customer on the team is that the customer probably doesn't want to know, let alone be involved with, how the sausage is made. They want a turnkey solution unveiled to them on the delivery date, all ready to go, with no effort on their part.
Generally what you want is a customer proxy in that role, who knows or can articulate what the customer needs better than the customer themselves can. Steve Jobs was a fantastic example of someone who filled this role.
augustk
It's also worth noting that a customer is not necessarily a user. As a developer I don't care so much about the customer but I care wholeheartedly about the users.
kevinlearynet
The best applications I've ever been a part of building, measured by user satisfaction, are those where the engineers:
1. Value simple, effective systems
2. Understand all use cases, because they use it
3. Have enough freedom to fix small things as they find them
#3 is controversial sometimes, but I believe this flexibility and creative freedom for devs leads to much happier people and much better products.
kayo_20211030
> I don’t know if structural engineering works like this, but I do know that software engineering doesn’t.
Structural Engineering (generally construction engineering) does work like that. Following the analogy, the engineers draw; they don't lay bricks. But, all the best engineers have probably been site supervisors at some point and have watched brick being layed, and spoken to the layers of bricks, etc. Construction methods change, but they don't change as quickly as software engineering methods. There is also a very material and applicable "reality" constraint. Most struct's knowledge/heuristics remains valid over long periods of time. The software engineers' body of knowledge can change 52 times in a year. To completely stretch the analogy - the site conditions for construction engineering are better known than the site conditions for a large software project. In the latter case the site itself can be adjusted more easily, and more materially, by the engineering itself i.e. the ground can move under your feet. Site conditioning on steroids!
Ultimately, that's why I agree fully with the piece. Generic advise may be helpful, but it always applies to some generic site conditions that are less relevant in practice.
bitwize
My father mentored some engineering college students about 15 years ago. He came away from the experience a bit disappointed: they knew how to model a part, but not how to machine one. When he came up in the world of slide-rule-and-drafting-pencil mechanical engineering, every engineer knew, in principle at least, how to machine a part; such knowledge was necessary for good designs because a design was instructions to shop-floor personnel on how to make the part, including info like materials to be used, tolerances, tools, etc.
imtringued
In CAD you can make an arbitrarily sized hole, in the real world you can only drill holes if you have the corresponding drill bit.
glitchc
It sounds like you are making the argument that there is no established way to generate good software. If that's the case, then software isn't engineering, but rather art. The former requires established/best practices to be called a discipline, while the latter is a creative endeavour.
kayo_20211030
That's true. I do. I consider it a creative art, with some disciplinary adjacency to engineering. The creative sculptor has to know the material stone in order to make anything good with it. But, construction engineering is creative too; just different.
Scarblac
I think we know how to reliably make good software. E.g. NASA manages.
The problem is that doing it like that is much too expensive and too slow for most businesses.
kayo_20211030
NASA is a bit of an outlier. In the 50's through the 70's any failure, particularly a failure involving the loss of a life, would have been a national catastrophe; a blow to national prestige. So, they were super careful that it didn't happen. The spent-cost was irrelevant compared to the reputational value at stake. Honestly, it was a wise investment given the operative quid pro quo in those days. Maybe they still do good software, I don't know, but I suspect that the value at risk today makes them more cost averse, and less sensitive to poor software.
"Business" runs the same calculations. I'd posit that, as a practical matter, most businesses don't want "good" software; they want "good enough" software.
pixl97
>and too slow for most businesses.
A lot of this is because while a 'good' business is waiting for the 'good' software to be written, some crappy business has already written the crappy software and sold it to all the customers you were depending on. In general customers are very bad at knowing the difference between good and bad software and typically buy what looks flashy or the sales people bribe them the most for.
atrettel
Reading that particular section made me think of the tree swing cartoon [1]. I agree that the best engineers have likely been on the ground making concrete changes at some point, watching bricks being laid as you said, but I have encountered quite a few supervisors who seemingly had no idea how things were being implemented on the ground. As the post says, people on the ground then sometimes have to figure out how to implement the plan even if it ignores sound design principles.
I don't view that as a failure of abstraction as a design principle as much as it is a pitfall of using the wrong abstraction. Using the right abstraction requires on the ground knowledge, and if nobody communicates that up the chain, well, you get the tree swing cartoon.
kayo_20211030
I agree with you. But, talk too long or too fulsomely about "abstractions" or "principles" and you'll lose the brick layers. They're paid by the course, generally. Trust them to make the site adjustments, but always verify that it's not a bad-bad-thing.
whstl
> The software engineers' body of knowledge can change 52 times in a year
Nah, those changes are only in the surface, at the most shallow level.
There's always new techniques, materials and tools in structural engineering as well.
Foundations take a lifetime to change.
RaftPeople
> Nah, those changes are only in the surface, at the most shallow level.
Very strongly disagree.
There are limitless methods of solving problems with software (due to very few physical constraints) and there are an enormous number of different measures of whether it's "good" or "bad".
It's both the blessing and curse of software.
whstl
Once again, that's only true at the surface level.
If you dig deeper you'll realize that it's possible to categorize techniques, tools, libraries, algorithms, recipes, whatever.
And if you dig even deeper, you'll realize that there is foundational knowledge that lets you understand a lot of things that people complain about being too new.
The biggest curse of software is people saying "no" to education and knowledge.
kayo_20211030
Respectfully, I disagree. You're correct on the facts, but any "new techniques, materials and tools" need to be communicated to the brick layers. That takes time and effort i.e. it all needs to be actively managed. The brick layers have to be able to work with those new techniques and materials. I don't want some of them using method #1 over here, and method #2 over there, unless I'm wholly conversant with the methods, and fully confident that it'll all mesh eventually. The system i.e. the whole shebang has to work coherently to serve its purpose.
whstl
> Respectfully, I disagree. You're correct on the facts, but
I'm fine with the disagreement if you say I'm correct. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> any "new techniques, materials and tools" need to be communicated to the brick layers
Same for software.
> That takes time and effort i.e. it all needs to be actively managed. The brick layers have to be able to work with those new techniques and materials.
Same for software.
> I don't want some of them using method #1 over here, and method #2 over there, unless I'm wholly conversant with the methods, and fully confident that it'll all mesh eventually. The system i.e. the whole shebang has to work coherently to serve its purpose.
Same for software.
Virtually every profession has a body of knowledge that's constantly getting updated. Only software engineers seem to have this faulty assumption that they must apply it all immediately. Acknowledging it's a false assumption leads to a better life.
wheelinsupial
> software engineers' body of knowledge can change 52 times in a year
I understand I’m replying against the spirit of your point, but the IEEE has actually published one and it seems to get updated very slowly.
https://www.computer.org/education/bodies-of-knowledge/softw...
aidenn0
And when changes are made at the site, bad things can happen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyatt_Regency_walkway_collapse...
MagicMoonlight
There is real irony in a blog post saying you can’t trust generic advice, which is itself a generic advice blog post, and links to other generic advice they have written.
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> The kinds of topic being discussed are not "is DRY better than WET", but instead "could we put this new behavior in subsystem A? No, because it needs information B, which isn't available to that subsystem in context C, and we can't expose that without rewriting subsystem D, but if we split up subsystem E here and here..."
Hmm, sounds familiar...
Bingo knows everyone's name-o
Papaya & MBS generate session tokens
Wingman checks if users are ready to take it to the next level
Galactus, the all-knowing aggregator, demands a time range stretching to the end of the universe
EKS is deprecated, Omega Star still doesn't support ISO timestamps
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ