This has to be adapted to the LLM era as well.
In my experience, LLM agents are pretty Grug-brained.
Grug has common sense. LLMs don't even have that.
The Grug Brained Developer (2022)
61–70 of 603 posts
Re: The Grug Brained Developer (2022)
#62So many gems in here but this one about microservices is my favorite: grug wonder why big brain take hardest problem, factoring system correctly, and introduce network call too
I keep trying to explain this to tiny dev teams (1-2 people) that will cheerfully take a trivial web app with maybe five forms and split it up into “microservices” that share a database, an API Management layer, a queue for batch jobs to process “huge” volumes (megabytes) of data, an email notification system, an observablity platform (bespoke!) and then… and then… turn the trivial web forms into a SPA app because “t…
> Now I understand that “architecture” and “patterns” is a jobs program for useless developers.
Yet, developers are always using patterns and are thinking about architecture.
Here you are doing so too, a pattern, "form submission" and an architecture, "request-response".
Re: The Grug Brained Developer (2022)
#63One thing to appreciate is that this article comes from someone who can do the more sophisticated (complex) thing, but tries not to based on experience.
There is of course a time and place for sophistication, pushing for higher levels of abstraction and so on. But this grug philosophy is saying that there isn't any inherent value in doing this sort of thing and I think that is very sound advice.
Also I noticed AI assistance is more effective with consistent, mundane and data driven code. YMMV
Re: The Grug Brained Developer (2022)
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would be really embarrassing to use one of the most popular, time-tested languages. Even if we decided to use Zig for everything, hiring for less popular languages like Zig, lua, or Rust is significantly harder. There are no developers with 20 years experience in Zig
You don't need developers with 20 years of experience in a specific language. Any decent engineer must be able to work with other languages and tools. What you're looking for is someone with experience building systems in your area of expertise. And even then, experience is often a poor substitute for competence.
> You don't need developers with 20 years of experience in a specific language.
You may in trivia quiz languages that have more features than anyone can learn in a lifetime
Re: The Grug Brained Developer (2022)
#65So many gems in here but this one about microservices is my favorite: grug wonder why big brain take hardest problem, factoring system correctly, and introduce network call too
I keep trying to explain this to tiny dev teams (1-2 people) that will cheerfully take a trivial web app with maybe five forms and split it up into “microservices” that share a database, an API Management layer, a queue for batch jobs to process “huge” volumes (megabytes) of data, an email notification system, an observablity platform (bespoke!) and then… and then… turn the trivial web forms into a SPA app because “t…
>I keep trying to explain this to tiny dev teams
I'm curious what role you have where you're doing this repeatedly
Re: The Grug Brained Developer (2022)
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Solopreneur making use of it in my bootstrapped B2B SaaS business. Clients don't need or want anything flashy. There are islands of interactivity, and some HTMX sprinkled there has been a great fit.
Wish I had your clients, instead of ones that say a page needs more “pizazz!”
I’m getting zombo.com vibes from this client request.
Re: The Grug Brained Developer (2022)
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would be really embarrassing to use one of the most popular, time-tested languages. Even if we decided to use Zig for everything, hiring for less popular languages like Zig, lua, or Rust is significantly harder. There are no developers with 20 years experience in Zig
Being at a firm where the decision to use C++ was made, the thought process went something like this: "We're going to need to fit parts of this into very constrained architectures." "Right, so we need a language that compiles directly to machine code with no runtime interpretation." "Which one should we use?" "What about Rust?" "I know zero Rust developers." "What about C++?" "I know twenty C++ developers and am conf…
People sometimes forget we're not just trying to use the shiniest tool for fun, we're trying to build something with deadlines that must be profitable. If you want to hire for large teams or do hard things that require software support, you often have to use a popular language like C++.
Re: The Grug Brained Developer (2022)
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Solopreneur making use of it in my bootstrapped B2B SaaS business. Clients don't need or want anything flashy. There are islands of interactivity, and some HTMX sprinkled there has been a great fit.
Wish I had your clients, instead of ones that say a page needs more “pizazz!”
The pizazz clients want sites for their customers, the no-frills clients want sites for them to use themselves.
Re: The Grug Brained Developer (2022)
#69So many gems in here but this one about microservices is my favorite: grug wonder why big brain take hardest problem, factoring system correctly, and introduce network call too
I keep trying to explain this to tiny dev teams (1-2 people) that will cheerfully take a trivial web app with maybe five forms and split it up into “microservices” that share a database, an API Management layer, a queue for batch jobs to process “huge” volumes (megabytes) of data, an email notification system, an observablity platform (bespoke!) and then… and then… turn the trivial web forms into a SPA app because “t…
It's all they've seen. They don't get why they're doing it, because they're junior devs masquerading as architects. There's so many 'senior' or 'architect' level devs in our industry who are utterly useless.
One app I got brought in late on the architect had done some complicated mediator pattern for saving data with a micro service architecture. They'd also semi-implemented DDD.
It was a ten page form. Literally that was what it was supposed to replace. An existing paper, 10 page, form. One of those "domains" was a list of the 1,000 schools in the country. That needed to be updated once a year.
A government spent millions on this thing.
I could have done it on my todd in 3 months. It just needed to use simple forms, with some simple client side logic for hiding sections, and save the data with an ORM.
The funniest bit was when I said that it couldn't handle the load because the architecture had obvious bottlenecks. The load was known and fairly trivial (100k form submissions in one month).
The architect claimed that it wasn't possible as the architecture was all checked and approved by one of the big 5.
So I brought the test server down during the call by making 10 requests at once.
Re: The Grug Brained Developer (2022)
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
It isn't as skimmable as some other writing styles, but if you read it one word at a time (either aloud or "in your head"), it's not too bad.
Sometimes if I'm reading something and having trouble with the words or sentences, I'll slow down and focus on the individual letters. Usually helps a tremendous amount.
Apologies if I came across as condescending.