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In Defense of Simple Architectures (2022)

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Re: In Defense of Simple Architectures (2022)

#221

Post by philote »

yowlingcat wrote: post #54
mrkeen wrote: post #49

> our architecture is a standard CRUD app architecture, a Python monolith on top of Postgres The rest of the article goes into why the above is not the case. The language was chosen because it was the CTO's pet, not for simplicity's sake. It wasn't the right choice: "its concurrency support, performance, and extensive dynamism make us question whether it’s the right choice for a large-scale backend codebase" Synchron…

Which language with those characteristics will have the same package ecosystem as Python so that your engineering team isn't left constantly reinventing the wheel? Do you think it's worth rebuilding stable packages that do a job well just because you don't think the language it was written in was perfect?

Honestly IMO Python does a good job these days without engineers having to reinvent the wheel. I've used asyncio with Starlette and/or FastAPI in larger-volume systems without much issues. I'm curious what specific issues the author had with async Python, and when that was since I don't see any such issues in my experience.

Re: In Defense of Simple Architectures (2022)

#222

Post by mkl95 »

JAlexoid wrote: post #192
TeMPOraL wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Workman like functionality isnt sexy, it wont be the hot bullet point on your resume, it wont get you your next job, but it is dam effective. So, not fun, not rewarding, no intellectual challenge, no career benefit. Why exactly should I want to do it? This isn't the goddamn United Federation of Planets, nor is the company a church - why exactly should I go above and beyond what I agreed to in exchange for my salary…

In my experience the boring "I delivered a project very fast with X,Y and Z and saved the company $100mil" will win over "I rearchitected a massive system to run on microservices" At a certain point in your career, you'll realize that the business manager can override any technical hiring manager. Because at the end of the day delivering results is sexier, than bells and whistles in your resume.

> "I rearchitected a massive system to run on microservices"

Saving a company from political mayhem is a pretty good achievement to have on your resume. It's also impressive because most engineering teams give up early on.

Re: In Defense of Simple Architectures (2022)

#223

Post by Spivak »

JAlexoid wrote: post #192
TeMPOraL wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Workman like functionality isnt sexy, it wont be the hot bullet point on your resume, it wont get you your next job, but it is dam effective. So, not fun, not rewarding, no intellectual challenge, no career benefit. Why exactly should I want to do it? This isn't the goddamn United Federation of Planets, nor is the company a church - why exactly should I go above and beyond what I agreed to in exchange for my salary…

In my experience the boring "I delivered a project very fast with X,Y and Z and saved the company $100mil" will win over "I rearchitected a massive system to run on microservices" At a certain point in your career, you'll realize that the business manager can override any technical hiring manager. Because at the end of the day delivering results is sexier, than bells and whistles in your resume.

> delivered a project very fast with X,Y and Z and saved the company $100mil

The problem is that $100mil is all pixie fairy dust when you're working on a new project. I wish this wasn't true but it works out better for you to implement it as costly and complex as possible, show off how smart you are, then simplify it during a cost cutting initiative (wow they must be so smart to make such an obviously complex system so simple).

The secret is that while you think you're getting away with something playing this game you're actually doing exactly what the business wants.

Re: In Defense of Simple Architectures (2022)

#224

Post by imiric »

a1o wrote: post #179
imiric wrote: post #161

Good article! I like that it suggests a pragmatic approach, and introduces complexity only when it's necessary and makes sense to do so. Often engineers advocating for KISS end up (poorly) reimplementing the complex version, when just adopting the "complex" alternative would've avoided them all the development and maintenance headaches. That said, "simple" and "complex" are subjective terms, and they're not easily de…

I don't like this grugbrain approach because complexity is subjective, as you mentioned, and the grugbrain mentions simply saying "no" instead of telling a dev to articulate why something shouldn't be in the codebase properly. I mention this because I've been a lot of times in a place where instead of adopting "well maintened library that everyone is using since more than a decade" I had to write and maintain my own…

I mean, I think that grug also agrees that saying "ok" to complexity makes sense sometimes. :)

I agree that this is a deep topic that requires a nuanced discussion, but my point is that I like the pragmatic approach mentioned in the article. You see threads here arguing that GraphQL and k8s are not simple, which is true, but I think it's wrong to hardheadedly avoid these technologies because of their "complexity", than to reach for them when the right time comes to use them.

Re: In Defense of Simple Architectures (2022)

#225

Post by mattbuilds »

mr_tristan wrote: post #220

I find that architecture should benefit the social structure of the engineering team, and there are limits. I work on one of these “simple architectures” at large scale… and it’s absolute hell. But then, the contributor count to this massive monorepo + “simple architecture” hell numbers in the thousands. Wave financial is only 350 people according to wikipedia - I doubt that’s 350 engineers. I know only of Google and…

The way I tend to look at it is to solve the problem you have. Don't start with a complicated architecture because "well once we scale, we will need it". That never works and it just adds complexity and increases costs. When you have a large org and the current situation is "too simple", that's when you invest in updating the architecture to meet the current needs.

This also doesn't mean to not be forward thinking. You want the architecture to support growth that will more than likely happen, just keep the expectations in check.

Re: In Defense of Simple Architectures (2022)

#226

Post by rizzom5000 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #97
zer00eyz wrote: post #10

Early in my career one of the IT guys told me that one of the people on staff was "a technical magpie". I looked at him with a raised eyebrow and he said "He has to grab every shiny piece of tech that shows up and add it to the pile". This is where we are. I can't tell you how many times I have seen projects get done just to pad a PM or developers resume. Just because it was the lastest and greatest hot shit thing to…

> Workman like functionality isnt sexy, it wont be the hot bullet point on your resume, it wont get you your next job, but it is dam effective. So, not fun, not rewarding, no intellectual challenge, no career benefit. Why exactly should I want to do it? This isn't the goddamn United Federation of Planets, nor is the company a church - why exactly should I go above and beyond what I agreed to in exchange for my salary…

> no intellectual challenge

I tend to think that cargo cult programming and resume-driven development are the intellectual path of least resistance. Perhaps it's analogous to, "I'd rather rewrite this than understand how it works", because that requires less intellectual effort. Quality engineering is not achieved by the intellectually lazy, from what I've seen.

Re: In Defense of Simple Architectures (2022)

#227

Post by feoren »

Jtsummers wrote: post #198
TeMPOraL wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Workman like functionality isnt sexy, it wont be the hot bullet point on your resume, it wont get you your next job, but it is dam effective. So, not fun, not rewarding, no intellectual challenge, no career benefit. Why exactly should I want to do it? This isn't the goddamn United Federation of Planets, nor is the company a church - why exactly should I go above and beyond what I agreed to in exchange for my salary…

> no intellectual challenge If it's not intellectually challenging, you're not working on interesting systems. If you have to find interesting tools to find intellectual stimulation, consider a different system to work on. As an example, I got to learn astrodynamics as part of my last job. Maybe not intellectually stimulating to everyone, but it didn't require me to learn the latest tooling just an interesting area o…

I use boring architectures: JS/TS hitting a single C# server hitting a single database. I have had to (and gotten the opportunity to) learn about:

- Environmental chemistry

- Mass balance simulations

- Wastewater treatment processes

- Geotechnical engineering

- Ecology

- Mass transit systems

And quite a bit more. I could not agree with you more. Even without the broad range of interesting subject matter, there's no end to intellectually stimulating work simply trying to architect a system well.

Re: In Defense of Simple Architectures (2022)

#228

Post by Zopieux »

Highlight that 99% of companies should take away from this piece:

>since we’re only handling billions of requests a month (for now), the cost of this is low even when using a slow language, like Python [and simple synchronous code], and paying retail public cloud prices.

Re: In Defense of Simple Architectures (2022)

#229

Post by MH15 »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #197

It was a genuine joy to see a website in this day and age which doesn't try to impose margins on text. I want my entire monitor to be used, and this site delivers.

You might be alone in this take. While I agree a lot of websites do it poorly, the only way I personally can read Danluu is when I make the window smaller.

Re: In Defense of Simple Architectures (2022)

#230

Post by BeFlatXIII »

JAlexoid wrote: post #199
duped wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the best jobs I ever had was under "technical magpie." Did we get shit done? No. Did I get paid a lot of money and always have new stuff to do instead of shoveling CRUD? Absolutely. It was a blast.

Yes, it's basically being in college - while being paid. If your resume is full of those kind of roles, I'd disregard your resume and many experienced managers will as well. Remember that your resume will not hold much value, when you give off "we built this thing with friends in a garage" in your resume and little else. Have you supported anything in production? No? Explain why should you be a candidate for anything…

> If your resume is full of those kind of roles, I'd disregard your resume and many experienced managers will as well.

That's why you lie about it.

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