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Software Architecture Is Overrated, Clear and Simple Design Is Underrated

blog.pragmaticengineer.com

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Re: Software Architecture Is Overrated, Clear and Simple Design Is Underrated

#51

Post by jillesvangurp »

hdfbdtbcdg wrote: post #34
rumanator wrote: post #15

I have a hard time understanding the author's point of not using UML but somehow boasting that they used "plain old boxes and arrows" to create "plenty of diagrams". UML is nothing more than a bunch of "plain old boxes and diagrams", but which have concrete, objective meaning that has been specified and thus help share ideas as objectively as possible. UML is a language, and languages are tools to communicate and sha…

This reminds me of the framework va libraries argument or ORM vs raw SQL. Yes frameworks and ORMs can be constraining and limit clever solutions. But when you need to add complex features to a complex project you are always glad that every other programmer that came before you was constrained and that things use a familiar pattern.

I've encountered spring/hibernate projects in the with lots of performance and integrity issues that were easy to straighten out by just cutting out the orm layer and replacing it with non magical, simple SQL. Magic is nice when it works but when it stops working and you lack the skills on the team to make sense of it, things get ugly quickly. This happens exactly when you are adding complex features that stretch the abilities of the framework you are using as well as the teams understanding of that framework.

I'm not a big fan of micro services. But one nice feature is that they are small and usually quite easy to grasp. That makes putting new people on them to do some changes a lot more feasible. A big monolith is much more complex.

I'm torn between building nice monoliths and doing micro services. IMHO for a small team micro services are rarely worth the complexity and overhead and I like the simplicity of having a nice monolith. However, with multiple teams in bigger organizations, it's a better fit. The risk to watch there is Conway's law where your org chart and architecture start resembling each other. The key risk here is the constant staff changes that necessitate having a speedy onboarding and ensuring there is a path forward when key people leave. Complex monoliths are a risk in such situations.

Simplicity and predictability are key here. This does not have to translate into ORM but it often does. IMHO with modern languages and framweorks, there's a trend for more code that does what it says vs. annotation code where all the magic happens in annotation processors that are opaque. This is playing out in the Spring community right now where the latest trend is using Kotlin DSLs to replace annotations and annotation processors. A side effect is that this allows using the graal vm to get rid of JVM startup overhead.

Part of that is losing ORM. E.g. the experimental Ko-Fu framework for Spring is taking that to the extreme: https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-fu

Re: Software Architecture Is Overrated, Clear and Simple Design Is Underrated

#52

Post by rumanator »

hdfbdtbcdg wrote: post #34
rumanator wrote: post #15

I have a hard time understanding the author's point of not using UML but somehow boasting that they used "plain old boxes and arrows" to create "plenty of diagrams". UML is nothing more than a bunch of "plain old boxes and diagrams", but which have concrete, objective meaning that has been specified and thus help share ideas as objectively as possible. UML is a language, and languages are tools to communicate and sha…

This reminds me of the framework va libraries argument or ORM vs raw SQL. Yes frameworks and ORMs can be constraining and limit clever solutions. But when you need to add complex features to a complex project you are always glad that every other programmer that came before you was constrained and that things use a familiar pattern.

I agree. However, I don't believe anyone has ever been constrained or limited by UML. They might be constrained by not knowing even the basics of UML, but that's not UML's failing.

Re: Software Architecture Is Overrated, Clear and Simple Design Is Underrated

#53

Post by Richard_East »

This is why ex-startup-founder product managers are so in-demand if they ever go back as employees. Releasing your own software to the market, even with the help of a small team, demands a level of design finesse which is difficult to realise in a big corporation. The results in terms of customer feedback, market fit, product functionality are also easy to evaluate for hirers compared to NDAd or vague prior work experience.

Markets are not fair or uninfluenced by luck, and not every product or startup will succeed financially or provide the lifestyle the founder desires. But I've found that ex-founders make excellent picks as employees since they have the ability to work seamlessly across an organisation, particularly with software devs, and understand fundamentally which product features and developmental changes are worthwhile pursuing.

Re: Software Architecture Is Overrated, Clear and Simple Design Is Underrated

#54

Post by lmm »

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #44
lmm wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can define it that way, but in that case my position would be: devoting time and effort to design leads to worse design than not doing so.

It depends on how carefully you've considered requirements before you begin coding. Sometimes when I start coding, it triggers the realization that I need to change the design, because I failed to deeply consider something well enough. When you're designing (paper, pen, boxes, arrows, no code), it can be easy to hand-wave or fail to consider real problems you might encounter.

Indeed. I'd argue that this is so common that it is better to begin coding first, and allow any "design" to emerge, rather than trying to design before coding. Perhaps with extreme care one could achieve a decent design up front, but it would surely take much more effort than simply being willing to refactor as one goes.

Re: Software Architecture Is Overrated, Clear and Simple Design Is Underrated

#55

Post by Scarbutt »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #36
jaequery wrote: post #5

First 1-3 years of coding, I just coded to get sht done. I got a lot of sht done. Next 4-8 years, I started getting cute with it and applied all kinds of design patterns, Factory, Abstractions, DI, Facade, Singleton you name it. It looked cute and felt good when it all worked but it was a juggling act. There was usually like 2-3 files to touch just to do one thing. UserFactory, UserService, UserModel, User, you get t…

>started getting cute with it and applied all kinds of design patterns Even though there are books about design patterns, taking such a book and trying to "apply" its patterns is a bit backwards I think. The idea of patterns is they describe commonly useful solutions, not designs you "should" use. Once you started to code in "pragmatic, minimalistic way" I assume you found you could apply the same solutions you had f…

Even though there are books about design patterns, taking such a book and trying to "apply" its patterns is a bit backwards I think. The idea of patterns is they describe commonly useful solutions, not designs you "should" use.

This nails it, and author does talk about it:

Similarly, knowing about common architecture patterns is a good thing: it helps shorten discussions with people, who understand them the same way as you do. But architecture patterns are not the goal, and they won't substitute for simpler system designs. When designing a system, you might find yourself having accidentally applied a well-known pattern: and this is a good thing. Later, you can reference your approach easier. But the last thing you want to do is taking one or more architecture pattern, using it as a hammer, looking for nails to use it on.

Re: Software Architecture Is Overrated, Clear and Simple Design Is Underrated

#56

Post by rumanator »

jameslk wrote: post #8

Sounds great for a tech company with highly skilled engineers. They can afford the type of talent who will be thinking thoughtfully and have the time to do so. Startups seem to attract similar talent, and when not, don't always have the same problems anyway. But what about the companies that can't afford the best engineers and don't have the bottom up culture? What about the companies that hire overseas IT agencies w…

> Sounds great for a tech company with highly skilled engineers. They can afford the type of talent who will be thinking thoughtfully and have the time to do so.

The blog post says nothing of the sort. It focuses on two aspects of software architecture which are entirely orthogonal to the design process: using a common language and tools to communicate and describe their ideas (UML, documentation) and leveraging knowledge and experience to arrive at a system's architecture that meet the project's requirements.

Deciding to invent their own personal language (their "boxes and arrows") and take a naive tabula rasa approach to software architecture does not change the nature of the task.

A rose by any other name...

Re: Software Architecture Is Overrated, Clear and Simple Design Is Underrated

#57

Post by stinos »

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #18
jaequery wrote: post #5

First 1-3 years of coding, I just coded to get sht done. I got a lot of sht done. Next 4-8 years, I started getting cute with it and applied all kinds of design patterns, Factory, Abstractions, DI, Facade, Singleton you name it. It looked cute and felt good when it all worked but it was a juggling act. There was usually like 2-3 files to touch just to do one thing. UserFactory, UserService, UserModel, User, you get t…

Over my career, I've worked with engineers that like to over-engineer and under-engineer. The over-engineered code looked like russian dolls: had many layers to it, and some of the abstractions offered no value. That can make onboarding to such code unnecessarily complex. On the other hand, under-engineered code made very little of use of even simple data structures or algorithms. I like to call it "chicken scratch"…

In my own experience, it's really a must to go through both over- and under-engineering phase yourself: only then I found I got a really clear view on what's good and bad in approach, allowing me to default to somewhere in between (with outliers when useful) and in any case with focus on simplicity (but again, if needed for e.g. performance that can be violated). All of this is the basic 'learn from your mistakes' principle in the end - and it works.

Re: Software Architecture Is Overrated, Clear and Simple Design Is Underrated

#58

Post by feketegy »

jaequery wrote: post #5

First 1-3 years of coding, I just coded to get sht done. I got a lot of sht done. Next 4-8 years, I started getting cute with it and applied all kinds of design patterns, Factory, Abstractions, DI, Facade, Singleton you name it. It looked cute and felt good when it all worked but it was a juggling act. There was usually like 2-3 files to touch just to do one thing. UserFactory, UserService, UserModel, User, you get t…

Most devs prepare for the abstraction nirvana. I see a lot of fellow devs creating complicated code, because "in case we need to switch out the database down the road" or "what if we want to run the web app in CLI"

In 20 years of programming I maybe seen one or two times a large application switched database engines and I've never seen a client want to run his/her web application in CLI...

The art in programming is to decide whether you need that abstraction or not.

Re: Software Architecture Is Overrated, Clear and Simple Design Is Underrated

#59

Post by cousin_it »

jameslk wrote: post #8

Sounds great for a tech company with highly skilled engineers. They can afford the type of talent who will be thinking thoughtfully and have the time to do so. Startups seem to attract similar talent, and when not, don't always have the same problems anyway. But what about the companies that can't afford the best engineers and don't have the bottom up culture? What about the companies that hire overseas IT agencies w…

A couple decades ago we had a world that mostly standardized on the LAMP stack. It was an architecture that solved everyone's webapp needs, switching projects was easy, life was good. Then SOA happened on the server side, JS monoliths happened on the client side, and here we are, worse off than when we started.

Re: Software Architecture Is Overrated, Clear and Simple Design Is Underrated

#60

Post by GuiA »

taneq wrote: post #46
GuiA wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well yes. It all sounds all so easy when you put it like that. The problem is that, in my experience at least, you can’t just teach junior engineers how to go straight to phase 3. You have to go through phase 1 and 2 to really develop a sense for what makes a solid, streamlined design. Some never get there - either because they become set in their ways early, or because they work in organizations where the wrong kind…

Carmack is actually a good example of professional development. A lot of what he talks about is how his style is evolving and the pros and cons of different approaches.

Yes, that’s a good addendum. Like any other craft, even the masters have always more to learn.

As they say, it is only when you get your black belt that you are really ready to start learning karate.

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