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Software Architecture Is Overrated, Clear and Simple Design Is Underrated

blog.pragmaticengineer.com

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Re: Software Architecture Is Overrated, Clear and Simple Design Is Underrated

#41

Post by paxys »

jaequery wrote: post #5

First 1-3 years of coding, I just coded to get sht done. I got a lot of sht done. Next 4-8 years, I started getting cute with it and applied all kinds of design patterns, Factory, Abstractions, DI, Facade, Singleton you name it. It looked cute and felt good when it all worked but it was a juggling act. There was usually like 2-3 files to touch just to do one thing. UserFactory, UserService, UserModel, User, you get t…

This describes my career perfectly. And at every stage I inevitably get annoyed at other engineers not in the same stage as me.

Re: Software Architecture Is Overrated, Clear and Simple Design Is Underrated

#42

Post by sebcat »

rumanator wrote: post #15

I have a hard time understanding the author's point of not using UML but somehow boasting that they used "plain old boxes and arrows" to create "plenty of diagrams". UML is nothing more than a bunch of "plain old boxes and diagrams", but which have concrete, objective meaning that has been specified and thus help share ideas as objectively as possible. UML is a language, and languages are tools to communicate and sha…

Data Flow Diagrams as described in "Structured Analysis and System Specification" (Tom DeMarco) are lightweight and provides a common way to describe a system with a focus on the flow of data.

The book also goes into detail on how to apply it. e.g., the value of having simple diagrams and have separate diagrams to break down the more complex processes in detail.

It's not rocket science, but I have found it helpful in the past to communicate ideas or existing designs.

Re: Software Architecture Is Overrated, Clear and Simple Design Is Underrated

#43

Post by taneq »

jaequery wrote: post #5

First 1-3 years of coding, I just coded to get sht done. I got a lot of sht done. Next 4-8 years, I started getting cute with it and applied all kinds of design patterns, Factory, Abstractions, DI, Facade, Singleton you name it. It looked cute and felt good when it all worked but it was a juggling act. There was usually like 2-3 files to touch just to do one thing. UserFactory, UserService, UserModel, User, you get t…

> I realize I code a lot slower now than in the past and that I write much fewer lines of code. It’s both good and bad because sometimes I’d even spend hours just trying to properly name a variable.

I think the important thing happening here is more than just naming. You’re taking the time to fully consider what you’re doing with the new variable in order to name it. That’s time very rarely wasted.

Re: Software Architecture Is Overrated, Clear and Simple Design Is Underrated

#44

Post by JMTQp8lwXL »

lmm wrote: post #29
JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Breaking things up is, by definition, design. Having meaningfully enforced boundaries between subsystems, that collectively add up to forming one larger project, is applying the concept of design.

You can define it that way, but in that case my position would be: devoting time and effort to design leads to worse design than not doing so.

It depends on how carefully you've considered requirements before you begin coding. Sometimes when I start coding, it triggers the realization that I need to change the design, because I failed to deeply consider something well enough.

When you're designing (paper, pen, boxes, arrows, no code), it can be easy to hand-wave or fail to consider real problems you might encounter.

Re: Software Architecture Is Overrated, Clear and Simple Design Is Underrated

#45

Post by JMTQp8lwXL »

tarsinge wrote: post #20
jaequery wrote: post #5

First 1-3 years of coding, I just coded to get sht done. I got a lot of sht done. Next 4-8 years, I started getting cute with it and applied all kinds of design patterns, Factory, Abstractions, DI, Facade, Singleton you name it. It looked cute and felt good when it all worked but it was a juggling act. There was usually like 2-3 files to touch just to do one thing. UserFactory, UserService, UserModel, User, you get t…

This mirror my experience too. I think at its core the issue is that code duplication is irrationally seen as a bad thing. But from my recent experience of the last few years with ultra minimalists approach making a change to a non abstracted code is so much faster. Yes it’s boring and feel unsophisticated, but when you only have flat functions vs an architecture tightly coupled to a business process, it’s a matter o…

I've seen code duplication fail me. In my current role, any time we want to spin up a new Node.js process, we "fork" an existing scaffold project. (Some of the repositories are actual forks; many more just copied the scaffold code and init'ed a new git repo). Whenever anything changes to the scaffold, there's no easy way to percolate those changes down the forks (then they all have to be versioned and deployed). It leads to a lot of copy-pasting and busy work that could instead be spent solving more pertinent company problems. Nobody ever considered how, once you end up with a growing X number of copies of what is nearly identical code, how to manage it. It's an increasingly unscalable problem for us. It would be 100% more efficient if all the development happened in a monolith that kept clear lines between the projects that exist as "forks".

Re: Software Architecture Is Overrated, Clear and Simple Design Is Underrated

#46

Post by taneq »

GuiA wrote: post #12
jaequery wrote: post #5

First 1-3 years of coding, I just coded to get sht done. I got a lot of sht done. Next 4-8 years, I started getting cute with it and applied all kinds of design patterns, Factory, Abstractions, DI, Facade, Singleton you name it. It looked cute and felt good when it all worked but it was a juggling act. There was usually like 2-3 files to touch just to do one thing. UserFactory, UserService, UserModel, User, you get t…

Well yes. It all sounds all so easy when you put it like that. The problem is that, in my experience at least, you can’t just teach junior engineers how to go straight to phase 3. You have to go through phase 1 and 2 to really develop a sense for what makes a solid, streamlined design. Some never get there - either because they become set in their ways early, or because they work in organizations where the wrong kind…

Carmack is actually a good example of professional development. A lot of what he talks about is how his style is evolving and the pros and cons of different approaches.

Re: Software Architecture Is Overrated, Clear and Simple Design Is Underrated

#47

Post by l0b0 »

Reading (OK, skimming) about this is a bit like a time machine. It's the kind of realization I expect people had in the early 2000s after fads like UML imploded massively. Is anyone taking architects like these seriously these days? Makes the article seem a bit like patting themselves on the back for not being bonkers.

Re: Software Architecture Is Overrated, Clear and Simple Design Is Underrated

#48

Post by cryptica »

Design is part of architecture so it doesn't make to compare them.

The best architectures are usually the simplest ones which get the job done.

To design the simplest architecture possible, you need to know exactly what "get the job done" means. Many software architects have no vision when it comes to seeing all possible use cases for the product so they don't know what are the minimal structural requirements. So either they underengineer or they overengineer based on what is more profitable for them as employees of the company.

Underengineering is also bad but it's rare nowadays because it usually doesn't align with employee salary incentives so we forgot how painful it is to maintain a code base which copy pastes the code everywhere.

Re: Software Architecture Is Overrated, Clear and Simple Design Is Underrated

#49

Post by Hokusai »

> However, no one person owned the architecture or design. The experienced developers did drive this.

The lack of formality does not mean a lack of the role. If "experienced developers" are the ones doing the design. They are de-facto architects.

> No mentions of microservices, serverless architecture, application boundaries, event-driven architecture, and the lot. Some of these did come up during brainstormings. However, there was no need to reference them in the design documents themselves.

So, the teams were thinking in patterns to discuss and express themselves. But, then decided to hide that and do not show the reasoning in the documentation, for reasons. That makes the job of understanding the conclusions of the discussion harder for people from outside their group.

I am all for transparency. If your company has architects but calls them "experienced engineers". If you use patterns and then remove them from your documentation. Your company is going to lack the transparency to allow everybody to participate.

Everybody has seen this with on-line rants. People raises and falls by politics. When they are one of the "expert engineers" they talk about cool company and meritocracy. When politics make them fall, then there comes a rant and how now the company "is not at it used to be".

I like to spend my time doing software engineering instead of politics and gaining upper management favor or fighting peers. Clear responsibilities help with that when a company is big enough. Like any system, a quantitative change - number of employees - may lead to a qualitative change that needs a change of approach. To try to run a 1000 people company like a 50 people startup is like trying to design in the same way a small server with a few queries per minute and a critical server with thousands of queries per second.

To each problem its own solution.

Re: Software Architecture Is Overrated, Clear and Simple Design Is Underrated

#50

Post by croh »

jaequery wrote: post #5

First 1-3 years of coding, I just coded to get sht done. I got a lot of sht done. Next 4-8 years, I started getting cute with it and applied all kinds of design patterns, Factory, Abstractions, DI, Facade, Singleton you name it. It looked cute and felt good when it all worked but it was a juggling act. There was usually like 2-3 files to touch just to do one thing. UserFactory, UserService, UserModel, User, you get t…

Well said. Similar to you, I code now almost exclusively in Flask. I don't want to spend days and night learning (and remembering for interviews) unnecessary abstractions and apis. Instead I prefer to spend more time on CS fundamentals, if I have to. Sad part of this story is broken hiring. Your resume doesn't get short-listed unless it comes with new hyped-shiny-toy. But this can encourage you to put more efforts on finding good employer.

Apart from juggling act you mentioned, there is another caveat. Many devs don't understand exact use-cases of these design patterns and use them in wrong context.

On foot note, If you don't have good team of engineers similar to OP, best way to craft your art is -

- pick up a good library in your subject

- start copying it line by line

- when copying, try to understand everything

- this will teach you lot about designing softwares

Even though this sounds like stupid and time consuming, it is not. Believe me. You don't have to even reach 100 %, just try to reach 33 %. You will learn lot by this in short period.

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