Very recently I’ve come to think of my architecture style as Jazz. Like the old trope about listening to the notes he isn’t playing. But also the improvisational nature and the flexibility to adapt to new information.
This is such a wonderfully concise way of describing something that I try to teach people.
I have come to use the phrase "no regrets". Leave things out, but do it in a way that you won't regret it, if you need to add it later.
Another phrase that I read somewhere else was, "Weeks of programming can save you hours of planning" (pretty sure I read it on HN, and I wish I had kept the link). The point being that when you decide to leave something out, or when you decide to intentionally do a half-assed job of something, you should still think about how someone in the future would go about efficiently fixing it.
If you do it right, there's missing functionality, but little or no technical debt. If you do it wrong, you miss out on functionality and also take on technical debt. And I think that's the subtlety that you speak of.
There’s a list of things I won’t try to add on later. It’s smaller than it used to be, but the shiv I brandish at you for suggesting we cut those corners is also much scarier.
Some things you can cut corners and save time.
Some things, when you cut the corners off you also cut your fingers off.
We have all promised that we will “fix it later”. But whatever we do now is what’s done. Fixing it later is a promise whose resolution is often not in our control.
Or as Feynman said, the trick is not to fool yourself, and you’re the easiest person to fool.
Or a personal favorite, unattributed: I know the guy who made this plan [me] and he’s full of shit.
Jim Highsmith has the best theory I’ve heard in the subject. His opinion is that the reason we keeps having the same unwinnable arguments is because we think in terms of solving problems but the real issue in front of us is resolving paradoxes. There are no neat answers that fit in a short essay box on the test everything depends, and everything depends on everything, and something is always changing.
What the PTSD reactions come from is other people making decisions on behalf of the rest of the team without consent. But like most things in software it’s a 2 dimensional problem not a 1 dimensional one. The trick is to delay irreversible decisions as long as possible and get all responsible parties involved.
The flip side of the coin is that reversible decisions should be made as cheaply as possible. For instance my “Kobayashi Maru” solution to the bike shedding problem is that the team should have budgeted three colors of paint into the bike shed budget, picked green for the first coat, and moved on immediately. That $200 is far cheaper than the time and importantly energy that would go into discussing this at a meeting with senior staff members present. If you start thinking about all of the $5000 conversations you have to solve $2000 problems it’ll drive you mad. I almost recommend you don’t look at it, for your own safety. Almost.
This is exactly right, but the irreversible decisions are often horizontal slices of software design that underlie other decisions - thing like authz, IPC, API design etc. If these questions can be identified and resolved up front, the cost of building vertical slices - features - goes way down. You're not tempted to reinvent the wheel, you can focus on the business logic.
What I'm saying is: it's worth spending time planning the foundations of a product. That includes the technology choices, but also the high level logical layout of the whole product. If you approach this foundational stuff like any other project, then if you're doing it right, you'll "get all responsible parties involved", like you should.
But defer the detailed planning of domain logic until you're actually ready to write it, and remain flexible with the plans you do make. "Plans are nothing; planning is everything".
Because like the GP said,
> the later you design something the more info at hand you have to make the design fit better
I find it remarkable how often engineers just leap in and start coding, and worry about the foundations later. Or never. I suspect this is one reason why rewrites are so common. If you start with bad foundations, it's often easier to blow up the whole building and start again.
To be fair, leaping in and starting coding allows you to discover the problem better. The problems start where you get stuck with your initial design and don't adjust/remake it once you explored some ideas, maybe found some new along the way and found out what doesn't fit.
That is of course problematic if you have deadline driven development because rewriting last 2 weeks of code might seem like total waste even if then-better design gonna save you much more even in near feature.
Not rewriting code when design flaws appear will lead to rewriting it eventually later and more expensive.
Of course, all of that depends on how much you know about domain and the problem. Exploring existing solutions and their flaws or having really detailed requirements might be much better approach that doesn't require starting to write code.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2007/04/frank-h-westh...
Not sure what the actual source is.
I tried to bottle it in this document: https://pcblues.com/assets/pdf/approaching_software_projects...
Don’t put a hyperkinetic person in charge of something thinking that you’ll call their bluff.
The potential need to scale and add features will inform my design decisions, but they will not direct them.
That's responsible, future-oriented development.
I'm not sure if Spirit of an Engineer is a book, essay, or some prior set of principles I'm unaware of but if it's not (and even if it is), I tend to disagree here.
The spirit of of an engineer, in my opinion, is to solve problems and problems for people--that's what I and most engineers I've spoken with have been drawn to (ignoring those purely seeking a high paying profession here since were talking about "spirit"). When I was youthful I sought out technical complexity and grandiose solutions (I admittedly still admire it when it's done correctly). None the less, to me, most of it is wasteful and at the end of the day I want to build the most useful solution for people to make their lives easier.
Some problems require high complexity and glass cathedrals in terms of technical solutions, most really don't, at least most of the problems I've been exposed to.
And yes, engineers really do err on the side of designing for future problems and future users that often will never exist. This effect is worst on a rewrite of a system - look up the "second system effect". We tend to only truly get pragmatic tradeoffs the third and later times.
Make a bare bones version and see if it sticks, and go from there. Both the Progressive Enhancement philosophy and the Lean Startup methodology demand the minimal before building further. Ex: Will anyone click this survey link? Who knows but you'll learn real quick if you offer them $50. If they still don't, then it probably ain't gonna get clicked ever. If they do, then you found at least _something_ viable.
Good idea, you are welcome to help me hone my later chapters. For me the engineering spirit - especially in software - is being a creator/builder. At the core, someone who takes the Legos in front of them and creates with those pieces.
A couple people took my "grandest" comment as a nod toward scale/size/narcissism, which is reasonable, and I meant it more in terms of total architectural completeness - i.e. a system perfectly fulfilling all the requirements that necessitated its creation. A blade of grass is not "grand" in the primary sense, but it still is grand + magnificent by its own perfection in design.
I’d vote for SWE if we are taking up acronym namespace
i think that's just delusions of grandeur. Not everybody would be (or should be) building the sistine chapel.
SW is weird in that way, we can basically build houses that nobody wants to live in. Thing is you probably were building the right thing, structurally speaking.
My rule over time has become "structure follows complexity" i.e. Anticipate complexity where possible but don't apply the engineering structure until the complexity really exists. If you built an MVP house, don't add the second bathroom until you've got customers complaining about deadlocks on the first.
It's tough because that basically runs counter to the Spirit of an Engineer, which is just to imagine the grandest well-thought-out + organized thing and march toward creating it.
The bonus of having two decades+ in building SW though is you start to see the patterns and realize that the same fundamental needs drive everything, so the intersection of building something great with customer needs becomes less of a mystery and more of a "how fast can we juice this thing". At that point I think scalability prep is like compound interest.