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Ask HN: Are we overcomplicating software development?

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Re: Ask HN: Are we overcomplicating software development?

#311

Post by madcocomo »

SatvikBeri wrote: post #63

Many of these practices are popularized by Google/Facebook/Amazon but don't make sense for a company with 100 or even 1,000 people. I try to focus on whether a practice will solve a concrete problem we're facing. Switching from Hadoop to Spark was clearly a good idea for our team, even though it required learning a new stack, but there isn't a strong reason to switch to Flink or start using Haskell. Agile makes sense…

> TDD is good for fast feedback in some domains,...... It hears like, "IDE is good for fast feedback in some domains. " If someone saying that IDE is only suitable for GUI application but not the software he is writing, he probably means that "look at me, I am the old school tough guy." It's about the people dislike the tool but nothing about the domain.

Re: Ask HN: Are we overcomplicating software development?

#312

Post by voycey »

SatvikBeri wrote: post #63

Many of these practices are popularized by Google/Facebook/Amazon but don't make sense for a company with 100 or even 1,000 people. I try to focus on whether a practice will solve a concrete problem we're facing. Switching from Hadoop to Spark was clearly a good idea for our team, even though it required learning a new stack, but there isn't a strong reason to switch to Flink or start using Haskell. Agile makes sense…

Quite possibly the first time I have agreed with everything in a post on HN! Just because a new paradigm exists doesn't mean it will solve all of your problems and will likely introduce several more!

Re: Ask HN: Are we overcomplicating software development?

#313

Post by adictator »

msluyter wrote: post #45

Though perhaps it's considered a component of 2), one could add Docker/containerization. I've watched folks spend weeks and weeks getting Docker setup for a service that probably didn't need to be containerized at all. And then once it's Dockerized, introspection/debugging/etc... seem to become much more difficult.

And what sort of services were those that didn't need to be containerized?

Re: Ask HN: Are we overcomplicating software development?

#314

Post by reledi »

lisivka wrote: post #150
fsloth wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally claiming that a person is doing the method wrong when the method brings no percieved benefits raises a red flag on the general applicability and value of the methodology itself on the problem the person is trying to solve. There is no one true way to organize development of software and generally shoehorning dogma without proof of value is counterproductive.

Are you really can stand for hours at the standup meeting? :-) Standup daily meeting must be short and focused. Moreover, standup meeting is for developers only. No project manager, no customer, no QA team. Just developers talking about their problems. Everything else deserves it own separate, hour long meeting once a week or two.

Just want to stress the importance of having stand-ups be developer-only. Do not let project managers, product owners, stakeholders, clients, and so forth become part of it. The developers won't be ready to start working when they take their seats because a lot was said in standup without actually saying much.

Re: Ask HN: Are we overcomplicating software development?

#315

Post by [deleted] »

madcocomo wrote: post #311
SatvikBeri wrote: post #63

Many of these practices are popularized by Google/Facebook/Amazon but don't make sense for a company with 100 or even 1,000 people. I try to focus on whether a practice will solve a concrete problem we're facing. Switching from Hadoop to Spark was clearly a good idea for our team, even though it required learning a new stack, but there isn't a strong reason to switch to Flink or start using Haskell. Agile makes sense…

> TDD is good for fast feedback in some domains,...... It hears like, "IDE is good for fast feedback in some domains. " If someone saying that IDE is only suitable for GUI application but not the software he is writing, he probably means that "look at me, I am the old school tough guy." It's about the people dislike the tool but nothing about the domain.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Are we overcomplicating software development?

#317

Post by disordinary »

SatvikBeri wrote: post #63

Many of these practices are popularized by Google/Facebook/Amazon but don't make sense for a company with 100 or even 1,000 people. I try to focus on whether a practice will solve a concrete problem we're facing. Switching from Hadoop to Spark was clearly a good idea for our team, even though it required learning a new stack, but there isn't a strong reason to switch to Flink or start using Haskell. Agile makes sense…

Having loosely coupled microservices has benefits for maintenance as well as scaleability. If you are quickly iterating on a product and have it up in a rough state then you can easily work on seperate parts without having to worry about effecting the whole.

Re: Ask HN: Are we overcomplicating software development?

#318

Post by chjh »

cgdub wrote: post #207
tunesmith wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One caveat is that if you need to fix a bug in your library in an API-compatible way, you can't reach into all the codebases that are using your library. You can deploy a new version of the microservice, though.

If you need to change your microservice's API in a non-backwards compatible way, you have the exact same problem plus significant operational complexity.

Don't you just create a new one and let the old go obsolete when the "users" switch?

Re: Ask HN: Are we overcomplicating software development?

#319

Post by aalbertson »

zeptomu wrote: post #296
crucini wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He probably uses flock(2)

But isn't that hard to get right? At least if you using something like sqlite you get consistency guarantees. Consider your process writing to the file and dying during write() - do you recover and repair the file after you reschedule?

Ramdisk maybe?

Re: Ask HN: Are we overcomplicating software development?

#320

Post by buzzybee »

There's a great discussion to be had in scaling your practices to the human factors.

For a solo developer, just breaking things out into modules and massaging the formatting is likely to be a net negative - something you might do once you've accumulated months of cruft and are ready to start handing it off to others or repurposing it for a new project, but also a chore that will get in the way of thinking about the job in front of you right now, a temptation to think top-down planning will come to your rescue. Your advantage is in being able to change direction immediately, and there are a lot of ways to give that up by accidentally following a practice for a larger team.

As a team gets bigger, it's more important to be cautious because of momentum; any direction you pick for development will be hard to stop once it gets going.

At the same time, there are processes and automations that help at every scale, and at the small scale they're just more likely to be little scripts and workflow conventions, not ironclad enforcements.

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