Don't be clever

To be clear I'm not being sarcastic. Many frameworks have code generators that writes boilerplate for you.

Then someone came along and invented partial classes in C# which made this problem go away. Well it would if anyone wanted to do all the maintenance legwork which they didn't so half of it's a 5 class inheritance tree, some of it's partial classes and someone got really fed up with this shit and just arbitrarily stuffed Dapper in there one afternoon.

Even our database records of "OAuth clients" went through it. I had wanted to make an optimization to those: I wanted to inline the OAuth client IDs for the mobile & web applications into the source code¹. The beast that was the CRUD controller stopped me in my tracks. I eventually gave up — too much complexity all muddled into one thing.

It was also "cleverly" general in that our admin interface built off it, and the UI thus built the table showing you what records existed … generically! Similarly, you could generically CRUD records. And one day … someone deleted the mobile client's record from the OAuth client's table, which of course breaks the mobile app and caused an outage, and lead me to wonder "why do we even have this lever, Kronk?" (While maybe it made sense to delete some random script's OAuth client … not so much the mobile app¹.)

Treating everything as a generic object that can be CRUD'd is one of those extremely leaky abstractions, and as the article gets at, it's usually the business logic that will reveal where the holes in the hull are.

We had another class of "objects" which were user uploads, and they went through about 4 different storage models (they started as rows in the database, and that didn't scale well at all — they ended up as S3 objects which was okay-ish). But my predecessors, when they added a newer, better way of storing these … didn't migrate the old ones. So the read logic had to be ready for a v1 upload or a v4 upload. A minor nightmare. So add "the DB model changes and is never migrated" to the list of things that screw these things up.

(I still see devs doing this — adding newer, better means of storing something but not migrating the old records — and it's massive tech debt, every time I've seen it. Inevitably, I've had someone want to do a "give me all the data" style query, and that necessitates dealing with all the caked on layers of upgrades.

My current company has this in the form of audit records. They started in the database … which … didn't … scale … and now they're in … a bucket in a cloud's blob storage, which is okay-ish.

So if you ever find yourself in one of these … please, please migrate the old data.)

I don't think codegen is the answer. I don't think codegen is ever the answer … "what happens when the generator changes?" is something I never see addressed. The old code rots, typically.

(¹because a.) unless the company folded, they weren't going to change, so I figured that a commit to remove the literal mobile app was fine in that case and b.) that meant that, for those clients, we didn't need to make DB requests to that table. IIRC we did this on every query.)