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What I'm Up to Now

martinfowler.com

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Re: What I'm Up to Now

#31

Post by jnwatson »

seibelj wrote: post #2

Martin Fowler has been a big advocate of micro services. I think micro services has been one of the biggest mistakes ever promulgated on software development and is responsible for developer misery, un-productivity, failed projects, and unintelligible rats nests that have set back a generation of engineers who have to now unlearn all of this nonsense. I can’t take him seriously and he is forever tainted in my mind. H…

Microservices are the simplest solution to counteract Conway's law.

If you have two organizations writing software, the least-overhead organizational approach that allows minimum communication overhead and release coordination is for both of those organizations to release a package and have well-defined APIs between those.

There are certainly other approaches to achieve similar outcomes, but microservices are the lowest-tech mechanism.

Re: What I'm Up to Now

#32

Post by seibelj »

staticassertion wrote: post #23
seibelj wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it particularly stupid compared to most other hyped technologies, as the pattern pervades the entire engineering superstructure and has to be entirely burned down in order to fix the core rot. The foundation of any microservice-based system is inherently shoddy in a way other poorly designed systems aren’t.

Your posts have no value. You've said nothing of substance, made no valid criticism. If you just want to vent go talk to a therapist, don't waste precious bytes.

The value of my post is that a charlatan with very damaging views has somehow been promoted as great thinker when I find his entire engineering philosophy not only incorrect but totally moronic and damaging. I’m calling it out because it’s really stupid and we need more people to feel OK calling bullshit when some idiot carts out the “we need 50 services to power the authentication pipeline!” which I have seen multiple times during my career, as other enthusiastic engineers cheer them on. It’s a dead idea and it is pointless, at least at when operating at the scale of 99% of tech companies. I’m not going to keep pretending this is a good idea when it’s not.

Re: What I'm Up to Now

#33

Post by nitrogen »

api wrote: post #5
orzig wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's the right pattern for some problems, and got overused when it was high on the hype curve? I don't have a horse in the race, but have seen many other technologies/patterns go that route

That statement describes basically every fad in development, every design pattern, and most if not all tools.

Indeed. It seems that it's useful to have descriptive patterns to understand what people are already doing. But then the hype cycle kicks in, and people treat them as prescriptive patterns. MVC, Agile, Design Patterns, monoliths, microservices, trunk-based, spaces vs tabs, Emacs vs Vim...

Re: What I'm Up to Now

#34

Post by teh_klev »

seibelj wrote: post #32
staticassertion wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your posts have no value. You've said nothing of substance, made no valid criticism. If you just want to vent go talk to a therapist, don't waste precious bytes.

The value of my post is that a charlatan with very damaging views has somehow been promoted as great thinker when I find his entire engineering philosophy not only incorrect but totally moronic and damaging. I’m calling it out because it’s really stupid and we need more people to feel OK calling bullshit when some idiot carts out the “we need 50 services to power the authentication pipeline!” which I have seen multip…

> some idiot carts out the “we need 50 services to power the authentication pipeline!”

That's not Fowler's fault. It's the fault of your solution architects who don't know how and when to use the right amount of seasoning in the sauce.

Re: What I'm Up to Now

#35

Post by sureglymop »

diskzero wrote: post #11

Fowler states: I’ve long known that when you’re doing very creative work, such as writing or programming, the useful hours you can do in a day is rather less than the accepted industrial eight. I don't want to disagree with him as this is quite subjective, but when I am totally engrossed in solving a problem, I get into a flow and the time flies by. If the problem is both interesting and challenging, I can't wait to…

I agree but the thing is that not every day in the week will be like that. So if you have this "hyperfocus" for two days a weeks and on the other days you don't do that much work it might average out to pretty much what he's describing.

Re: What I'm Up to Now

#36

Post by staticassertion »

nitrogen wrote: post #30
staticassertion wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your posts have no value. You've said nothing of substance, made no valid criticism. If you just want to vent go talk to a therapist, don't waste precious bytes.

If you just want to vent go talk to a therapist, don't waste precious bytes. Nobody holds comments they agree with to this high of a bar. You are being way too harsh, and this borders on personal attack. One of the ways modern society is breaking down is that nobody has a community they can vent to and relate to. Everything is somebody else's problem. If someone has something to say, let them say it. If they didn't s…

All they're doing is repeatedly insulting this guy with absolutely no meaningful content across multiple posts. It's garbage, it's nothing but unsubstantiated attacks. I don't see how my post was a personal attack either, I said to vent elsewhere, in an appropriate venue.

Re: What I'm Up to Now

#37

Post by Jare »

jnwatson wrote: post #31
seibelj wrote: post #2

Martin Fowler has been a big advocate of micro services. I think micro services has been one of the biggest mistakes ever promulgated on software development and is responsible for developer misery, un-productivity, failed projects, and unintelligible rats nests that have set back a generation of engineers who have to now unlearn all of this nonsense. I can’t take him seriously and he is forever tainted in my mind. H…

Microservices are the simplest solution to counteract Conway's law. If you have two organizations writing software, the least-overhead organizational approach that allows minimum communication overhead and release coordination is for both of those organizations to release a package and have well-defined APIs between those. There are certainly other approaches to achieve similar outcomes, but microservices are the low…

> least-overhead

> well-defined APIs

That's where most shifts to microservices fail, right? Sometimes because they don't define their APIs well, sometimes because the breakdown into packages/services is broken (for example: defined by company structure instead of sane software architecture), sometimes because the evolution of each package's features and functionality is at odds with the stability of their API's semantics and guarantees (and documentation), sometimes because the development overhead of communicating between APIs is too high (debugging for example)...

Re: What I'm Up to Now

#38

Post by mack1001 »

Probably not necessarily on topic - but I really want to give a shout out to Mr. Fowler. It’s really hard to find anyone in contemporary and practical software engineering who has been as impactful as he has been. A lot of modern concepts that improve software development has a seminal article authored or made visible by him.

Re: What I'm Up to Now

#39

Post by detaro »

seibelj wrote: post #32
staticassertion wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your posts have no value. You've said nothing of substance, made no valid criticism. If you just want to vent go talk to a therapist, don't waste precious bytes.

The value of my post is that a charlatan with very damaging views has somehow been promoted as great thinker when I find his entire engineering philosophy not only incorrect but totally moronic and damaging. I’m calling it out because it’s really stupid and we need more people to feel OK calling bullshit when some idiot carts out the “we need 50 services to power the authentication pipeline!” which I have seen multip…

> we need 50 services to power the authentication pipeline!

If the architect is an adherent of Fowler, you can then ask where to get the 50-400 engineers needed for building said pipeline, citing Fowler for teamsizes. ;)

Re: What I'm Up to Now

#40

Post by recursivedoubts »

Martin, if you are reading this, here's something you could do:

Revisit REST (and the Richardson Maturity Model[1]) and explain why REST has failed so spectacularly in the JSON API world.

It's worth doing because REST-ful hypermedia systems are using an interesting and distinctive network model, and most younger web engineers don't know much about it and end up using the client-server approaches that have become so common for modern web applications.

You are in a great (perhaps the best) position to respark interest in hypermedia and the REST-ful approach.

I have some thoughts on the matter[2][3][4], and would be happy to discuss.

--

[1] - https://www.martinfowler.com/articles/richardsonMaturityMode...

[2] - https://intercoolerjs.org/2016/01/18/rescuing-rest.html

[3] - https://intercoolerjs.org/2016/05/08/hatoeas-is-for-humans.h...

[4] - https://htmx.org/essays/hypermedia-apis-vs-data-apis/

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