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To be clear: I'm responding to your approach to frameworks, not your first example of search result aggregation. I also want to emphasise I'm posting this out o

by etripe 6y ago

To be clear: I'm responding to your approach to frameworks, not your first example of search result aggregation. I also want to emphasise I'm posting this out of genuine interest, not contrarianism or antagonism. Is there overlap between your philosophical layers and practical utility? The kinds of things that have been required to change in my career so far were base assumptions in the business domain, which no amount of premature abstraction could have prepared me for. I've never witnessed a need to "swap out" an entire layer. Have you? In what scenario did you need to swap out... what exactly? Did these philosophical abstractions turn out to be the correct ones when a need did arise? Did they make the transition to the new reality easier? Does the transition cost outweigh the slower development cost incurred from the abstractions' overhead? I keep seeing people claim your approach is a good one, and I'm genuinely curious if there is any evidence backing it up. I'll gladly take anecdata.

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
> I've never witnessed a need to "swap out" an entire layer. Have you? Many times, but the code assets (and the examples) are not ones that I can share. Feel free to dismiss it, if you like. I won't lose sleep over it. What I can share, is that I have written frameworks in technology that is either deliberately "low-tech," or that is something that I know will probably not age particularly well, so I make it easy to replace. One example that I can give, is the BAOBAB server, that I wrote a couple of years ago[0]. It has four layers, and the ANDISOL layer[1] is the one that acts as a programmatic façade to the SQL-based database layers, below. It is explicitly designed to be the "swap out" point for the system. In reality, I would suspect that this would only be the first part of a swap that would eventually replace the BASALT layer[2], but it would allow a graduated, incremental replacement strategy (I have done these a number of times. They are not for the faint of heart). For example, when I talked about adding a command to the API, I just added one a few days ago, where I added a call to return a fast list of user IDs and display names[7]. I needed this for a "look-ahead" text entry autofill, in a social media app that I'm building on top of BAOBAB. I could have easily added this to BASALT, and that would have been that. It would have been fast, quite safe, and wouldn't have required the elaborate nested submodule synchronization that is required when I tweak BADGER[3]. The problem is, that the command was a low-level SQL call, at its heart, and those belong in BADGER or CHAMELEON[4]. They certainly should never be exposed above ANDISOL. So I added it to BADGER, then implemented a "pass-through" in CHAMELEON, and in ANDISOL (what is exposed to BASALT). Since BADGER is nested inside of CHAMELEON, which is nested inside of COBRA[5], which is nested inside of ANDISOL, which is nested inside of BASALT, I had to bump each of their versions, and update the submodule (I despise Git submodules) chain for each. This is a fairly trivial example, but I take things like modularity, and domains fairly seriously. Also, it's a good way to keep security[6] fairly high. This may not have answered your question, but it might help you to see how I work. [0] https://riftvalleysoftware.com/work/open-source-projects/#baobab https://riftvalleysoftware.com/work/open-source-projects/#ba... [1] https://open-source-docs.riftvalleysoftware.com/docs/baobab/a00365.html https://open-source-docs.riftvalleysoftware.com/docs/baobab/... [2] https://open-source-docs.riftvalleysoftware.com/docs/baobab/a00364.html https://open-source-docs.riftvalleysoftware.com/docs/baobab/... [3] https://open-source-docs.riftvalleysoftware.com/docs/baobab/a00368.html https://open-source-docs.riftvalleysoftware.com/docs/baobab/... [4] https://open-source-docs.riftvalleysoftware.com/docs/baobab/a00367.html https://open-source-docs.riftvalleysoftware.com/docs/baobab/... [5] https://open-source-docs.riftvalleysoftware.com/docs/baobab/a00366.html https://open-source-docs.riftvalleysoftware.com/docs/baobab/... [6] https://riftvalleysoftware.com/BAOBAB/PDFs/Security.pdf https://riftvalleysoftware.com/BAOBAB/PDFs/Security.pdf (Opens a PDF File) [7] https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/baobab/commit/d8316a1b8ff85907145747c587116008a4d47e04 https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/baobab/commit/d8316a1b...
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  I should mention that this also allows me to do things like hire a programmer that is better than I am to refactor portions of the system. I am not an expert at server tech. There's a good chance that we'll be hiring contractors to work on the server, once we get a bit more spending dosh.

by etripe 6y ago

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago

> I've never witnessed a need to "swap out" an entire layer. Have you? Many times, but the code assets (and the examples) are not ones that I can share. Feel free to dismiss it, if you like. I won't lose sleep over it. What I can share, is that I have written frameworks in technology that is either deliberately "low-tech," or that is something that I know will probably not age particularly well, so I make it easy to replace. One example that I can give, is the BAOBAB server, that I wrote a couple of years ago[0]. It has four layers, and the ANDISOL layer[1] is the one that acts as a programmatic façade to the SQL-based database layers, below. It is explicitly designed to be the "swap out" point for the system. In reality, I would suspect that this would only be the first part of a swap that would eventually replace the BASALT layer[2], but it would allow a graduated, incremental replacement strategy (I have done these a number of times. They are not for the faint of heart). For example, when I talked about adding a command to the API, I just added one a few days ago, where I added a call to return a fast list of user IDs and display names[7]. I needed this for a "look-ahead" text entry autofill, in a social media app that I'm building on top of BAOBAB. I could have easily added this to BASALT, and that would have been that. It would have been fast, quite safe, and wouldn't have required the elaborate nested submodule synchronization that is required when I tweak BADGER[3]. The problem is, that the command was a low-level SQL call, at its heart, and those belong in BADGER or CHAMELEON[4]. They certainly should never be exposed above ANDISOL. So I added it to BADGER, then implemented a "pass-through" in CHAMELEON, and in ANDISOL (what is exposed to BASALT). Since BADGER is nested inside of CHAMELEON, which is nested inside of COBRA[5], which is nested inside of ANDISOL, which is nested inside of BASALT, I had to bump each of their versions, and update the submodule (I despise Git submodules) chain for each. This is a fairly trivial example, but I take things like modularity, and domains fairly seriously. Also, it's a good way to keep security[6] fairly high. This may not have answered your question, but it might help you to see how I work. [0] https://riftvalleysoftware.com/work/open-source-projects/#baobab https://riftvalleysoftware.com/work/open-source-projects/#ba... [1] https://open-source-docs.riftvalleysoftware.com/docs/baobab/a00365.html https://open-source-docs.riftvalleysoftware.com/docs/baobab/... [2] https://open-source-docs.riftvalleysoftware.com/docs/baobab/a00364.html https://open-source-docs.riftvalleysoftware.com/docs/baobab/... [3] https://open-source-docs.riftvalleysoftware.com/docs/baobab/a00368.html https://open-source-docs.riftvalleysoftware.com/docs/baobab/... [4] https://open-source-docs.riftvalleysoftware.com/docs/baobab/a00367.html https://open-source-docs.riftvalleysoftware.com/docs/baobab/... [5] https://open-source-docs.riftvalleysoftware.com/docs/baobab/a00366.html https://open-source-docs.riftvalleysoftware.com/docs/baobab/... [6] https://riftvalleysoftware.com/BAOBAB/PDFs/Security.pdf https://riftvalleysoftware.com/BAOBAB/PDFs/Security.pdf (Opens a PDF File) [7] https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/baobab/commit/d8316a1b8ff85907145747c587116008a4d47e04 https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/baobab/commit/d8316a1b...

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
I should mention that this also allows me to do things like hire a programmer that is better than I am to refactor portions of the system. I am not an expert at server tech. There's a good chance that we'll be hiring contractors to work on the server, once we get a bit more spending dosh.