41–50 of 201 posts
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…
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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…
> "Oh, we're slowly building up a custom, buggy, binary framing protocol. Lets just use protobuf/msgpack" By using protobuf/msgpack you lose the ability to precisely control the layout and encoding of your data on the wire. Most applications don't care, but this results in your wire representation being defined by "whatever protobuf says". Say I want to transmit an unsigned 16 bit integer with protobuf. How do I do t…
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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…
> There's real skill in creating simple solutions to complex problems. Not entirely facetiously, I think that, for engineers, there's real skill in creating simple solutions to simple problems—not, for example, finding the general instance of the problem and solving that, when the problem is unlikely to recur and crafting the perfect general solution delays delivery on what's actually in front of you. (I know Perl's…
OK I reckon everyone is going to get on the HTMX wagon over the course of the next few months, and it's going to blow a ton of young minds and save a huge amount of global energy and make a lot of people very happy. And then these same inquisitive young people are going to click enough links on htmx.org that they stumble across hyperscript and it's gonna be like that moment in Dusk till Dawn where the vampires come o…
Spoiler very much alert.
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'm reminded of that one quote from a letter of some author [paraphrasing, and I've seen it (mis-)attributed to Mark Twain and too many people to look the real quote up] "Apologies for the length, I did not have time to write a shorter letter". EDIT: I ironically wrote way too long here. Grug say better: > note, this good engineering advice but bad career advice: "yes" is magic word for more shiney rock and put in ch…
In my experience, people trying to make code DRY also wind up writing over-complicated patterns and abstractions to make it so.
I think a large amount of over-engineering is likely due to people applying patterns where they don't need to, or building unnecessary abstractions, or otherwise doing what they think is "good code".
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…
measure LOC in my opinion. the local minima will move around based on the complexity of what you’re building - so there’s room for many reasonably intelligent opinions to be right. imperfect measure but directionally correct, works great on log scale
I think it does a pretty good job of identifying if you're fighting your tech/language or doing things the "intended" idiomatic way. The difference is usually at least an order of magnitude in LOC.
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…
That's what factorio is for!