The Software Architecture Demon
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Yes to this. Glad I have some support here. Everyone but you and Sander are all sideeying me now. :laugh:
Real programmers use butterflies
Just heard a line "we all stand together" on the radio: The Frog Chorus & Paul McCartney - We All Stand Together - YouTube[^] :-\
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"Simplify, simplify" -- Thoreau I totally agree, but I prefer to work alone anyway. I never begin with much of a plan, I simply begin and see where it goes. Twice I recall being handed a "spec" for something I was to develop, but I ignored them and did what I knew was right -- one of the specs was actually dangerous. Specs always come from people who have no idea what they're doing, but want to appear smarter than the people who do. For one personal project, I made kind of a grid to track which features needed to be developed, which didn't, and which I had completed, but that's about it.
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I agree to a point.
Rage wrote:
Part of the architecture is to structure the system, or the code, exactly so that people who want to do this can do it, and are not bothered with higher level topics.
This is how it should be. In my professional experience it was sometimes the case that a software project would be designed appropriately for its size and the team situation. In many cases, it simply wasn't. People would endlessly decouple things that only one person was ever going to work on, and this kind of thing happens all the time. The design would end up taking up the majority of the bandwidth even well past the design phase after the project was supposed to be nailed down. I've seen projects deathmarch over it even. Basically the project was thought to death. Is it as common as badly designed or simply undesigned software? No. Is it destructive and harmful to projects? Yes! I guess to sound cliche it's about moderation. You have to make the design appropriate for a project. I'm not dismissing UML entirely either. But it's is one of those things that strikes as having the perception of being far more useful than it actually is.
Real programmers use butterflies
honey wrote:
People would endlessly decouple things that only one person was ever going to work on, and this kind of thing happens all the time. The design would end up taking up the majority of the bandwidth even well past the design phase after the project was supposed to be nailed down. I've seen projects deathmarch over it even. Basically the project was thought to death.
Wow. I guess the world has changed since I last had a salaried job, because I only saw this twice in over 20 years. The second time, I realized what would eventually happen, so I transferred to another group and built the appropriate subset of the same thing that a team of 30 or 40 were working on.
Robust Services Core | Software Techniques for Lemmings | Articles
The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. -
"Simplify, simplify" -- Thoreau I totally agree, but I prefer to work alone anyway. I never begin with much of a plan, I simply begin and see where it goes. Twice I recall being handed a "spec" for something I was to develop, but I ignored them and did what I knew was right -- one of the specs was actually dangerous. Specs always come from people who have no idea what they're doing, but want to appear smarter than the people who do. For one personal project, I made kind of a grid to track which features needed to be developed, which didn't, and which I had completed, but that's about it.
It takes a certain talent to be able to code like that, and I respect it. Naturally I do, because I'm much the same way when left to my own devices. It's useful to know architecture, UML and all of that mess just to be able to communicate with people who speak it, and I will concede that huge projects with large teams pretty much demand architecture and pre-planning but otherwise just let me at the code.
Real programmers use butterflies
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I used to be a software architect. I think that's part of why I employ such a jaundiced eye when it comes to layered service architectures and sweeping design patterns just because and drowning in UML because reasons. It's true that when you're dealing with million dollar implementations, multiple deployment points, and disparate teams a lot of this abstraction can be useful. But how common is that in most people's development? I know it is for some of you, sure, but I think you're in the minority, or at least projects like these are in the minority. Not everyone is Plum Creek or Alcoa. It seems like the field of software architecture has taken on a life of its own and coupled with CPU cores to waste and infinite scaling out it has - and i'll just say it - poisoned software development. Just because you know how to do something doesn't mean you should. Most software application architectures do not survive contact with clients plus the erosion of time. They have a shelf life of significantly less than 10 years without some major portion of them being retooled. There are exceptions to this, but designing every solution to be that exception is a waste of time, money and creative energy. I'm also going to come out and say it makes things harder to maintain. When you're working with 20 different classes and interfaces where 3 would do it just increases the learning curve. There are definitely diminishing returns when it comes to decoupling software from itself, and you run into the cost/benefit wall pretty fast. It can only take you so far. It's best not to overdo it. Every fancy little UML entity you drop into your project increases the cognitive load of your project for other developers. Personally, I wouldn't care about that, because "cognitive load" is fun as far as I'm concerned but most people just want to do their work and go home, not spend odd hours studying someone else's work just so they can use it. Keep It Simple Stupid. Whatever happened to that? :sigh:
Real programmers use butterflies
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honey wrote:
People would endlessly decouple things that only one person was ever going to work on, and this kind of thing happens all the time. The design would end up taking up the majority of the bandwidth even well past the design phase after the project was supposed to be nailed down. I've seen projects deathmarch over it even. Basically the project was thought to death.
Wow. I guess the world has changed since I last had a salaried job, because I only saw this twice in over 20 years. The second time, I realized what would eventually happen, so I transferred to another group and built the appropriate subset of the same thing that a team of 30 or 40 were working on.
Robust Services Core | Software Techniques for Lemmings | Articles
The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.I was a software architect and consultant working primarily in project rescue. I came across all kinds of trash fires.
Real programmers use butterflies
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This is just as true for "frameworks". When was the last time a generic framework actually did what you wanted it to do?
Yes. Although I'll grudgingly accept that for its size, Microsoft did a fair job with the .NET BCL
Real programmers use butterflies
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I used to be a software architect. I think that's part of why I employ such a jaundiced eye when it comes to layered service architectures and sweeping design patterns just because and drowning in UML because reasons. It's true that when you're dealing with million dollar implementations, multiple deployment points, and disparate teams a lot of this abstraction can be useful. But how common is that in most people's development? I know it is for some of you, sure, but I think you're in the minority, or at least projects like these are in the minority. Not everyone is Plum Creek or Alcoa. It seems like the field of software architecture has taken on a life of its own and coupled with CPU cores to waste and infinite scaling out it has - and i'll just say it - poisoned software development. Just because you know how to do something doesn't mean you should. Most software application architectures do not survive contact with clients plus the erosion of time. They have a shelf life of significantly less than 10 years without some major portion of them being retooled. There are exceptions to this, but designing every solution to be that exception is a waste of time, money and creative energy. I'm also going to come out and say it makes things harder to maintain. When you're working with 20 different classes and interfaces where 3 would do it just increases the learning curve. There are definitely diminishing returns when it comes to decoupling software from itself, and you run into the cost/benefit wall pretty fast. It can only take you so far. It's best not to overdo it. Every fancy little UML entity you drop into your project increases the cognitive load of your project for other developers. Personally, I wouldn't care about that, because "cognitive load" is fun as far as I'm concerned but most people just want to do their work and go home, not spend odd hours studying someone else's work just so they can use it. Keep It Simple Stupid. Whatever happened to that? :sigh:
Real programmers use butterflies
Like everything in life and art, there are two faces to this coin: at one extreme you have spaghetti code and at the other you have massive libraries of hundreds of classes and structures (I'm looking at you LEDA and BOOST). The golden path is in the middle. Our job is to find that middle path. I heard someone saying that engineering is the art of finding when one is approximately equal to two and when one is much smaller than two. I let you with these two quotes: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” - A. Einstein "You should be glad that bridge fell down - I was planning to build thirteen more to the same design" - Remark attributed to I. K. Brunel, addressing the Directors of the Great Western Railway.
Mircea
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Like everything in life and art, there are two faces to this coin: at one extreme you have spaghetti code and at the other you have massive libraries of hundreds of classes and structures (I'm looking at you LEDA and BOOST). The golden path is in the middle. Our job is to find that middle path. I heard someone saying that engineering is the art of finding when one is approximately equal to two and when one is much smaller than two. I let you with these two quotes: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” - A. Einstein "You should be glad that bridge fell down - I was planning to build thirteen more to the same design" - Remark attributed to I. K. Brunel, addressing the Directors of the Great Western Railway.
Mircea
Mircea Neacsu wrote:
“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” - A. Einstein
I *almost* dropped that quote in my rant, and I bring it up all the time when it comes to software. :laugh:
Mircea Neacsu wrote:
"You should be glad that bridge fell down - I was planning to build thirteen more to the same design" - Remark attributed to I. K. Brunel, addressing the Directors of the Great Western Railway.
Haha it's funny because it's true!
Real programmers use butterflies
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Bosses are ... well ... bosses :) Not the worst case, I met a head of DBA's in one international company who never heard of normal forms. Discussion between her and reporting team was marvellous. She couldn't understand why reporting team are so much displeased about xml in fields. It is so easy to parse, isn't it? :cool:
Hahaha whoops. Although in fairness, I *became* a DBA out of necessity because a lot of smaller shops I worked for in the late 90s and early aughts had nobody and no clue. I can respect having to learn on the job, but the key is to *learn* on the job.
Real programmers use butterflies
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This is just as true for "frameworks". When was the last time a generic framework actually did what you wanted it to do?
Well, a framework isn't supposed to do anything!
Robust Services Core | Software Techniques for Lemmings | Articles
The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. -
It sounds like you've got a good handle on things. :)
Real programmers use butterflies
If only :sigh: Been hurting my brains over some stupid .NET Framework Azure AD Authentication thing all day and I've got nothing. I even asked a question in Q&A about it, first one since 2018 :omg:
Best, Sander Azure DevOps Succinctly (free eBook) Azure Serverless Succinctly (free eBook) Migrating Apps to the Cloud with Azure arrgh.js - Bringing LINQ to JavaScript
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If only :sigh: Been hurting my brains over some stupid .NET Framework Azure AD Authentication thing all day and I've got nothing. I even asked a question in Q&A about it, first one since 2018 :omg:
Best, Sander Azure DevOps Succinctly (free eBook) Azure Serverless Succinctly (free eBook) Migrating Apps to the Cloud with Azure arrgh.js - Bringing LINQ to JavaScript
That's just coding. Just last night I had to 1. Determine why a driver was randomly dropping characters from strings printed to a screen, but only if they were small text. Turns out the driver wasn't tested very well with my hardware and i had to modify the timing of it. 2. Determine why text wasn't displaying after i put a solid white background on it. I have to draw it twice. I still don't know why. See also, dodgy driver. 3. Implement my own HTTP chunked encoding scheme just so I could bulk upload some JSON from a machine with a total of just over 500k of ram. Worse, I had to timestamp my uploads with a valid date time but my machine has no clock. I was ... creative. #1 and #2 sent me to some forums to post questions for which I got no answers. #3 simply took hours. That's just development, so when I say you've got a good handle on things I still think you do. Your machine isn't on fire, you're not going bald from stress, and you're not seriously contemplating a career in pizza delivery if you make it out of this project alive. You're fine. :thumbsup:
Real programmers use butterflies
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That's just coding. Just last night I had to 1. Determine why a driver was randomly dropping characters from strings printed to a screen, but only if they were small text. Turns out the driver wasn't tested very well with my hardware and i had to modify the timing of it. 2. Determine why text wasn't displaying after i put a solid white background on it. I have to draw it twice. I still don't know why. See also, dodgy driver. 3. Implement my own HTTP chunked encoding scheme just so I could bulk upload some JSON from a machine with a total of just over 500k of ram. Worse, I had to timestamp my uploads with a valid date time but my machine has no clock. I was ... creative. #1 and #2 sent me to some forums to post questions for which I got no answers. #3 simply took hours. That's just development, so when I say you've got a good handle on things I still think you do. Your machine isn't on fire, you're not going bald from stress, and you're not seriously contemplating a career in pizza delivery if you make it out of this project alive. You're fine. :thumbsup:
Real programmers use butterflies
I went from pizza delivery to coding! And there were times I wished I'd never left! :laugh:
Robust Services Core | Software Techniques for Lemmings | Articles
The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. -
That's just coding. Just last night I had to 1. Determine why a driver was randomly dropping characters from strings printed to a screen, but only if they were small text. Turns out the driver wasn't tested very well with my hardware and i had to modify the timing of it. 2. Determine why text wasn't displaying after i put a solid white background on it. I have to draw it twice. I still don't know why. See also, dodgy driver. 3. Implement my own HTTP chunked encoding scheme just so I could bulk upload some JSON from a machine with a total of just over 500k of ram. Worse, I had to timestamp my uploads with a valid date time but my machine has no clock. I was ... creative. #1 and #2 sent me to some forums to post questions for which I got no answers. #3 simply took hours. That's just development, so when I say you've got a good handle on things I still think you do. Your machine isn't on fire, you're not going bald from stress, and you're not seriously contemplating a career in pizza delivery if you make it out of this project alive. You're fine. :thumbsup:
Real programmers use butterflies
honey the codewitch wrote:
Your machine isn't on fire, you're not going bald from stress, and you're not seriously contemplating a career in pizza delivery
How do you know all these things? Are you watching me!? :~ There's actually quite some stuff stressing me out at the moment, that stupid API being one of them :laugh: What I fear most at the moment is that when Christmas comes I can't take my well-deserved two weeks off because my work isn't done yet :omg:
Best, Sander Azure DevOps Succinctly (free eBook) Azure Serverless Succinctly (free eBook) Migrating Apps to the Cloud with Azure arrgh.js - Bringing LINQ to JavaScript
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honey the codewitch wrote:
Your machine isn't on fire, you're not going bald from stress, and you're not seriously contemplating a career in pizza delivery
How do you know all these things? Are you watching me!? :~ There's actually quite some stuff stressing me out at the moment, that stupid API being one of them :laugh: What I fear most at the moment is that when Christmas comes I can't take my well-deserved two weeks off because my work isn't done yet :omg:
Best, Sander Azure DevOps Succinctly (free eBook) Azure Serverless Succinctly (free eBook) Migrating Apps to the Cloud with Azure arrgh.js - Bringing LINQ to JavaScript
You've downloaded my code before, silly. So of course I am always watching you. Through your computer. What the hell did you think most of those "parsers" actually were anyway? Why else would I write 20 incomprehensible but nevertheless popular projects for people to download? Spyware, my good man. The money is great. By the way, reset your passwords.
Real programmers use butterflies
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I used to be a software architect. I think that's part of why I employ such a jaundiced eye when it comes to layered service architectures and sweeping design patterns just because and drowning in UML because reasons. It's true that when you're dealing with million dollar implementations, multiple deployment points, and disparate teams a lot of this abstraction can be useful. But how common is that in most people's development? I know it is for some of you, sure, but I think you're in the minority, or at least projects like these are in the minority. Not everyone is Plum Creek or Alcoa. It seems like the field of software architecture has taken on a life of its own and coupled with CPU cores to waste and infinite scaling out it has - and i'll just say it - poisoned software development. Just because you know how to do something doesn't mean you should. Most software application architectures do not survive contact with clients plus the erosion of time. They have a shelf life of significantly less than 10 years without some major portion of them being retooled. There are exceptions to this, but designing every solution to be that exception is a waste of time, money and creative energy. I'm also going to come out and say it makes things harder to maintain. When you're working with 20 different classes and interfaces where 3 would do it just increases the learning curve. There are definitely diminishing returns when it comes to decoupling software from itself, and you run into the cost/benefit wall pretty fast. It can only take you so far. It's best not to overdo it. Every fancy little UML entity you drop into your project increases the cognitive load of your project for other developers. Personally, I wouldn't care about that, because "cognitive load" is fun as far as I'm concerned but most people just want to do their work and go home, not spend odd hours studying someone else's work just so they can use it. Keep It Simple Stupid. Whatever happened to that? :sigh:
Real programmers use butterflies
My first recollection of "software life" was 5 years. The "architecture" issue I see is most are into "piece" work; without caring / knowing / wondering how it fits into a bigger picture. The million (code) monkeys and a million keyboards and eventually we get some useful algorithms / patterns.
It was only in wine that he laid down no limit for himself, but he did not allow himself to be confused by it. ― Confucian Analects: Rules of Confucius about his food
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You've downloaded my code before, silly. So of course I am always watching you. Through your computer. What the hell did you think most of those "parsers" actually were anyway? Why else would I write 20 incomprehensible but nevertheless popular projects for people to download? Spyware, my good man. The money is great. By the way, reset your passwords.
Real programmers use butterflies
:laugh: I know for a fact that's not true. The horrors you'd have seen on my computer would've left you blind and unable to type that message :D Many a ransomware criminals have paid me to let them unlock my computer ;p On the other hand, you use braceless if-statements and I can't think of more unspeakable abominations than that :~
Best, Sander Azure DevOps Succinctly (free eBook) Azure Serverless Succinctly (free eBook) Migrating Apps to the Cloud with Azure arrgh.js - Bringing LINQ to JavaScript
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:laugh: I know for a fact that's not true. The horrors you'd have seen on my computer would've left you blind and unable to type that message :D Many a ransomware criminals have paid me to let them unlock my computer ;p On the other hand, you use braceless if-statements and I can't think of more unspeakable abominations than that :~
Best, Sander Azure DevOps Succinctly (free eBook) Azure Serverless Succinctly (free eBook) Migrating Apps to the Cloud with Azure arrgh.js - Bringing LINQ to JavaScript
I have spent some time spelunking the depths of coding depravity it's true, but just look at these gems I've found! my precious! Your computer is tame. I don't even see a dodgy and outdated copy of GRUB in your bootloader code. Where is your sense of adventure?
Real programmers use butterflies
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I have spent some time spelunking the depths of coding depravity it's true, but just look at these gems I've found! my precious! Your computer is tame. I don't even see a dodgy and outdated copy of GRUB in your bootloader code. Where is your sense of adventure?
Real programmers use butterflies
Ok, you've convinced me, changing my passwords now :laugh:
Best, Sander Azure DevOps Succinctly (free eBook) Azure Serverless Succinctly (free eBook) Migrating Apps to the Cloud with Azure arrgh.js - Bringing LINQ to JavaScript
