Accidentally Load Bearing
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Accidentally Load Bearing
1–10 of 204 posts
Re: Accidentally Load Bearing
#2This (the unimportant stud becoming load bearing later on) makes sense, but in my experience it’s kind of a sign of lazy design. When making software at least, you know when you’re trying to use a decorative stud to hold up part of your house, and choosing to do it anyway instead of building some new better structure does make for a pretty sad dev team later on
This is to say —- I agree with the article, but much nicer is to work at a place where you don’t expect to make this particular discovery very often, hah
Re: Accidentally Load Bearing
#3This (the unimportant stud becoming load bearing later on) makes sense, but in my experience it’s kind of a sign of lazy design. When making software at least, you know when you’re trying to use a decorative stud to hold up part of your house, and choosing to do it anyway instead of building some new better structure does make for a pretty sad dev team later on This is to say —- I agree with the article, but much nic…
s/lazy/lack of/
Hidden files in unix were a bug.
Re: Accidentally Load Bearing
#4This (the unimportant stud becoming load bearing later on) makes sense, but in my experience it’s kind of a sign of lazy design. When making software at least, you know when you’re trying to use a decorative stud to hold up part of your house, and choosing to do it anyway instead of building some new better structure does make for a pretty sad dev team later on This is to say —- I agree with the article, but much nic…
> you know when
More often than not I've seen this happen because they, in fact, do not know.
Re: Accidentally Load Bearing
#5This (the unimportant stud becoming load bearing later on) makes sense, but in my experience it’s kind of a sign of lazy design. When making software at least, you know when you’re trying to use a decorative stud to hold up part of your house, and choosing to do it anyway instead of building some new better structure does make for a pretty sad dev team later on This is to say —- I agree with the article, but much nic…
> you know when you’re trying to use a decorative stud to hold up part of your house
"You" might know it in "your" creations, but in my career I am much more often working and reworking in other people's creations.
I think the point of the article is not that you should avoid using decorative studs as load-bearing elements, but that you should be aware that others may have done so before you came along.
This is an even more conservative position than the default Chesterton's Fence reading, which is itself dismissed by a lot of people as pedantically restrictive.
For me, the parent article resonates. I have definitely had ceilings come crashing down on my head when I removed a piece of "ornamental" trim (programmatically speaking)
Re: Accidentally Load Bearing
#6reminds me of Hyrum’s law a bit.
Re: Accidentally Load Bearing
#7One benefit software has over physical systems is that you can easily document it right inside the code with comments and types to make the intention clearer. This isn’t foolproof, especially in dynamic languages like Python, but helps a lot.
The analogy for the load bearing stud might be a hackathon project that never expected to see production. In reality, a lot of what we do is hack on something until it barely works, and move on to the next thing.
Re: Accidentally Load Bearing
#8This (the unimportant stud becoming load bearing later on) makes sense, but in my experience it’s kind of a sign of lazy design. When making software at least, you know when you’re trying to use a decorative stud to hold up part of your house, and choosing to do it anyway instead of building some new better structure does make for a pretty sad dev team later on This is to say —- I agree with the article, but much nic…
s/lazy/lack of/ Hidden files in unix were a bug .
And then .DS_Store in MacOS was basically a bug, too. A lack of understanding coupled with a lack of design.
Re: Accidentally Load Bearing
#9I've definitely had this happen. With my own code, even. I build something complex, it's released to production, and a few months later I realise that something about it should be done in a different way, so I look at it, and other people have already built on top of the thing I wanted to change.
On the other hand, if you can't figure out what something is for, sometimes the easiest way to find out is to remove it and see what breaks. Maybe that's not such a great idea for that load-bearing stud, but in software it's easy to undo.
Re: Accidentally Load Bearing
#10This (the unimportant stud becoming load bearing later on) makes sense, but in my experience it’s kind of a sign of lazy design. When making software at least, you know when you’re trying to use a decorative stud to hold up part of your house, and choosing to do it anyway instead of building some new better structure does make for a pretty sad dev team later on This is to say —- I agree with the article, but much nic…
>When making software at least, you know when you’re trying to use a decorative stud to hold up part of your house
Do you? Sometimes quick-one-time fixes becomes the center of important software.