Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Grug Brained Developer (2022)

grugbrain.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 201 posts

Re: The Grug Brained Developer (2022)

#4

Post by jauntywundrkind »

Grug came up a week ago in a Philosophy of Software Design submission's comments. I thought the commentary was pretty good. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38011938

> I feel the exact same about grug. I don't think people actually agree on what's simple, so it's pretentious to pretend your "simple" is the obvious one that a caveman would agree with.

Simple/simplicity is often one of the most complex things to discover. I see a lot of people resolute & certain that everything around them (except what they do) is complex & needs to be bent into simplicity. It feels dangerously weak & clutching after authority.

Re: The Grug Brained Developer (2022)

#5

Post by hotnfresh »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #4

Grug came up a week ago in a Philosophy of Software Design submission's comments. I thought the commentary was pretty good. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38011938 > I feel the exact same about grug. I don't think people actually agree on what's simple, so it's pretentious to pretend your "simple" is the obvious one that a caveman would agree with. Simple/simplicity is often one of the most complex things to di…

What I like so much about the Grug piece is that it’s full of nuance and humility. It’s not pretentious.

Re: The Grug Brained Developer (2022)

#6

Post by jongjong »

It's weird how smart people are naturally attracted to complexity like moth to a flame. It takes years to learn to fight the urge to over-engineer.

Once you learn to see it though, it's hard to ignore. Now I can tell instantly if code is over-engineered. Unfortunately It seems like maybe 99% of code is over-engineered. The developer's incentive to maximize their own lock-in factor and billable hours are powerful forces. Even developers who appear to be totally robotic and ego-less are often guilty of over-engineering. It works on the subconscious mind. Few are ever able to escape the mindset because they are not fully conscious. They are not thinking about every single line of code that they write. They decide on some goal and then churn out whatever code first pops into their heads to get incrementally closer to that goal... Not realising that, at each step, there were many alternative paths that which were superior.

Re: The Grug Brained Developer (2022)

#9

Post by josephg »

jongjong wrote: post #6

It's weird how smart people are naturally attracted to complexity like moth to a flame. It takes years to learn to fight the urge to over-engineer. Once you learn to see it though, it's hard to ignore. Now I can tell instantly if code is over-engineered. Unfortunately It seems like maybe 99% of code is over-engineered. The developer's incentive to maximize their own lock-in factor and billable hours are powerful forc…

I struggle with this constantly. I think there are two problems:

1. I like interesting puzzles. A lot of code - especially commercial code - is pretty boring if you do it right. I find myself subconsciously pushing for features that will be fun to implement. And by "fun", I mean, features that will overcomplicate everything.

2. While I'm in the middle of programming something, all the choices that I make seem straightforward and necessary. Its only later when I step away from my code and then try to understand it with fresh eyes do I notice what a mess I've made of everything.

I also think that a lot of the time the most obvious solution to most problems is quite complex. It takes wisdom, skill and domain knowledge to know where to look for simple solutions to any given problem. Simple, clean solutions are rarely obvious.

"Oh, it looks like we're slowly implementing a halfbaked message queue. Lets use a standard message queue instead." "Oh, we're slowly building up a custom, buggy, binary framing protocol. Lets just use protobuf/msgpack". "How about instead of writing a custom RPC protocol to fetch data, we just use REST over HTTP. And then we can put nginx in the middle to cache our backend responses, and we can throw out our custom cache."

Re: The Grug Brained Developer (2022)

#10

Post by eldavido »

josephg wrote: post #9
jongjong wrote: post #6

It's weird how smart people are naturally attracted to complexity like moth to a flame. It takes years to learn to fight the urge to over-engineer. Once you learn to see it though, it's hard to ignore. Now I can tell instantly if code is over-engineered. Unfortunately It seems like maybe 99% of code is over-engineered. The developer's incentive to maximize their own lock-in factor and billable hours are powerful forc…

I struggle with this constantly. I think there are two problems: 1. I like interesting puzzles. A lot of code - especially commercial code - is pretty boring if you do it right. I find myself subconsciously pushing for features that will be fun to implement. And by "fun", I mean, features that will overcomplicate everything. 2. While I'm in the middle of programming something, all the choices that I make seem straigh…

This is it. There's real skill in creating simple solutions to complex problems. Knowing the general landscape of what's out there, and easily available off the shelf, really does help.

Developers grow. It starts with simple code that doesn't work. The next step is, complicated code that solves the problem, in messy unmaintainable ways. The next step is writing super clean, almost boring code, that's highly readable and "dumb" and does exactly what it's supposed to do.

The other thing to realize, a lot of great code doesn't just spring from the developer's hands in its final form -- it's extensively edited and rewritten into its final, good, form.

Post reply on HN