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Comments (59)

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  fogleman
  > The kinds of topic being discussed are not "is DRY better than WET", but instead "could we put this new behavior in subsystem A? No, because it needs information B, which isn't available to that subsystem in context C, and we can't expose that without rewriting subsystem D, but if we split up subsystem E here and here..."Hmm, sounds familiar...Bingo knows everyone's name-oPapaya & MBS generate session tokensWingman checks if users are ready to take it to the next levelGalactus, the all-knowing aggregator, demands a time range stretching to the end of the universeEKS is deprecated, Omega Star still doesn't support ISO timestampshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ
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  nullorempty
  > You can't design software you don't work onIn 30 years in software dev, I am yet to see any significant, detailed and consistent effort to be extended into design and architecture. Most architects do not design, do not architect.Senior devs design and architect and then take their design to the architects for *feedback and approvals*.These senior devs make designs for features and only account for code and systems they've been exposed to.With an average employment term of 2 years most are exposed to a small cut of the system, which affects the depth and correctness of their design.And architects mostly approve, sometimes I think without even reading the docs.At most, you can expect the architects to give generic advice and throw a few buzzwords.At large, they feel comfortable and secure in their positions and mostly don't give a shit!
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  eviks
  > For instance: In large codebases, consistency is more important than “good design”But this is exactly the type of generic software design advice the article warns us about! And it mostly results in all all the bad software practices we as users know and love remaining unchanged (consistently "bad" is better than being good at least in some areas!)
• skydhash
  "Generic Software Design" as the author called it, is nice for setting the general direction of some implementation. This is why I like to read software engineering books. It's easier to solve a problem if you have some kind of framing to guide you. And it's easier to talk about the solution if everyone share the same terminology.But yes, the map is not the territory, and giving directions is not the same as walking the trail. The actual implementation can deviate from the plan drafted at the beginning of the project. A good explanation is found in Naur's Theory of Programming, where he says the true knowledge of the system is inside the head of the engineers that worked on it. And that knowledge is not easily transferrable.
• 7402
  > if you come up with the design for a software project, you ought to be responsible for the project’s success or failureI think this should also apply to people who come up with or choose the software development methodology for a project. Scrum masters just don't have the same skin in the game that lead engineers do.
• jkaptur
  There are two extremes here: first, the "architects" that this article rails against. Yes, it's frustrating when a highly-paid non-expert swoops in to offer unhelpful or impossible advice.On the other hand, there are Real Programmers [0] who will happily optimize the already-fast initializer, balk at changing business logic, and write code that, while optimal in some senses, is unnecessarily difficult for a newcomer (even an expert engineer) to understand. These systems have plenty of detail and are difficult to change, but the complexity is non-essential. This is not good engineering.It's important to resist both extremes. Decision makers ultimately need both intimate knowledge of the details and the broader knowledge to put those details in context.0. http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html
• mashally
  True somehow, I see a lot of people who don't understand the business well cannot, absolutely, design a good software.
• Sankozi
  "In large codebases, consistency is more important than “good design”" - this is completely opposite from my experience. There is some value in consistency within single module but consistency in a large codebase is a big mistake (unless in extremely rare case that code base consists entirely of very similar modules).Modules with different requirements should not have single consistent codebase. Testing strategy, application architecture, even naming should be different across different modules.
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  kayo_20211030
  > I don’t know if structural engineering works like this, but I do know that software engineering doesn’t.Structural Engineering (generally construction engineering) does work like that. Following the analogy, the engineers draw; they don't lay bricks. But, all the best engineers have probably been site supervisors at some point and have watched brick being layed, and spoken to the layers of bricks, etc. Construction methods change, but they don't change as quickly as software engineering methods. There is also a very material and applicable "reality" constraint. Most struct's knowledge/heuristics remains valid over long periods of time. The software engineers' body of knowledge can change 52 times in a year. To completely stretch the analogy - the site conditions for construction engineering are better known than the site conditions for a large software project. In the latter case the site itself can be adjusted more easily, and more materially, by the engineering itself i.e. the ground can move under your feet. Site conditioning on steroids!Ultimately, that's why I agree fully with the piece. Generic advise may be helpful, but it always applies to some generic site conditions that are less relevant in practice.
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  augustk
  In the best scenario the developers are also active users of the software they produce. Then a design flaw or an error that affects the users will also affect the developers and will (hopefully) motivate the latter to correct it.
• ilaksh
  This is also the type of thing that makes having separate software architects that aren't actually maintaining the software generally a nonsensical idea.There are too many decisions, technical details, and active changes to have someone come in and give direction from on high at intervals.Maybe at the beginning it could make sense sort of, but projects have to evolve and more often than not discover something important early on in the implementation or when adding "easy" features, and if someone is good at doing software design then you may need them even more at that point. But they may easily be detrimental if they are not closely involved and following the rest of the project details.
• anon
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• MagicMoonlight
  There is real irony in a blog post saying you can’t trust generic advice, which is itself a generic advice blog post, and links to other generic advice they have written.
• dcre
  Very impressed at the rate of high-quality interesting posts from this author.
• roguecoder
  The problem isn't programmers: it is cheap-ass executives obsessed with compliance.Good software designers are facilitators. They don't tell people how to build software, but say "not like that" by making the technical requirements clear. They enable design to constantly change as the needs change.It has been a long time since I've been at a company willing to actually employ someone in that roll. They require that their most senior engineers be focused on writing code themselves, at the expense of the team and skill-building necessary for quality software.Instead we get bullshit like "team topologies" or frameworks that are more about how the company wants to manage teams than they are about how well the software works. We get "design documents" that are considered more important than working code. Even the senior engineers that are around aren't allowed to say "no" if it is going to interfere with some junior project manager's imagined deadline.Software companies are penny-wise and pound foolish, resulting in shittastic spaghetti messes with microservice meatballs.
• watters
  The second footnote acknowledges that the post is largely tautological.
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  austin-cheney
  I completely disagree with almost the entirety of the article. It’s all about prior experience building large things many times yourself, not using some framework or other external abstraction.When you have done this many times you absolutely can design a large application without touching the code. This is part planning and risk analysis experience and part architecture experience. You absolutely need a lot of experience creating large applications multiple times and going through that organizational grind but prior experience in management and writing high level plans is extremely helpful.
• narag
  The article incurs in the very same problem it's describing. It's generic advice that might not be appliable to specific situations.
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  michaelt
  I've always felt it's unrealistic to separate upfront architecture from implementation, because my experience is a lot of systems turn out to have requirements that are a lot more complex in reality than they might seem at first, even if you think quite hard about the requirements.Imagine if you worked for an online retailer like Amazon, and you were assigned to architect a change so you can add free sample items into customers' orders. Take a moment to think about how you'd architect such a system, and what requirements you'd anticipate fulfilling. In the next paragraph, I'll tell you what the requirements are. Or you can skip the next paragraph, the size of which should tell you the requirements are more complex than they seem.The samples must be items in the basket, so the warehouse knows to pick them. They must be added at the moment of checkout, because that's when the order contents and weight can change. Often a customer should receive a sample only once, even if they check out multiple orders - so a record should be kept of which customers have already been allocated a given sample. It should be possible to assign a customer the same sample multiple times, in which case they should receive it once per order until they've received the assigned number. Some samples go out of stock regularly, so the sample items should not be visible to the customer when they view their order on the website, but if shipped it should appear on their receipt to assure them they haven't been charged for it. Samples should never be charged for, even if their barcode is identical to something we normally charge for. If the warehouse is unable to ship the sample, the customer should not receive a missing-item apology or a separate shipment, and the record saying that customer has had that sample already should be decremented. If the warehouse can't ship anything except the sample, the entire orders should be delayed/cancelled, never shipping the sample alone. If a customer ordered three of an item and was assigned one sample item with the same barcode but the warehouse only had three items with that barcode in stock, something sensible should happen. One key type of 'sample' is first-time-customer gifts; internal documentation should explain that if the first order a customer places is on 14-day delivery and their second order is on faster delivery and arrives first, the first-order gift will be in the second order to arrive but that's expected because it's assigned at checkout. If the first-order-checked-out is cancelled, either by the customer or the warehouse, the new-customer gift should be added to the next order they check out. Some customers will want to opt out of free samples, those who do should not be assigned any samples. But the free sample system is also used by customer services to give out token apology gifts to customers whose orders have had problems, customers who've been promised a gift should receive it even if they've opted out of free samples.No reasonable person can design such a system upfront, because things like 'opt-out mechanism sometimes shouldn't opt you out' and 'more than one definition of a customer's first order' do not occur to reasonable people.