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> It doesn't scale to massive collaborative systems where you need rigid interfaces between components. But I suspect many of us are solving problems that don't

> It doesn't scale to massive collaborative systems where you need rigid interfaces between components. But I suspect many of us are solving problems that don't actually need that complexity. Here's the issue. Starting out you almost certainly don't need that rigid interface. However, the longer the app grows the more that interface starts to matter and the more costly retrofitting it becomes. The company I currently worked at started out with a "just get it done" approach which lead to things like any app reaching into any database directly just to get what it needs. That has created a large maintenance issue that to this day we are still trying to deal with. Modifying the legacy database schema in any way takes multiple months of effort due to how it might break the 20 systems that reach into it.

crq-yml 2y ago
My take on what the issue is, is primarily in the ramifications of Conway's law and how our social structures map to systems. When the system is small, it makes a great deal of sense to be an artisan and design simple automations that work for exactly that task, which for the most common things is always supported by any production-oriented programming environment - there's a lot of ways in which you can't go wrong because the problem is so small relative to the tools that any approach will crush it. "Just get it done" works because no consequence is felt, and on the time scale of "most businesses fail within five years", it might never be. When it's large, everyone would prefer to defer to a common format and standard tools. The problems are now complex, have to be discussed and handled by many people, they need documentation and clear boundaries on roles and responsibilities. But common formats and standards are a pyramid of scope creep - eventually it has to support everyone - and along the way, monopolistic organizations vie for control over it in hopes of selling the shovels and pickaxes for the next gold rush. So we end up with a lot of ugly compatibility issues. In effect, the industry is always on this treadmill of hacking together a simple thing, blowing out the complexity, then picking up the pieces and reassembling them into another, slightly cleaner iteration. Maintenance can be done successfully - there are always examples of teams and organizations that succeed - but like with a lot of infrastructure, there's an investment bias towards new builds.

crq-yml 2y ago

My take on what the issue is, is primarily in the ramifications of Conway's law and how our social structures map to systems. When the system is small, it makes a great deal of sense to be an artisan and design simple automations that work for exactly that task, which for the most common things is always supported by any production-oriented programming environment - there's a lot of ways in which you can't go wrong because the problem is so small relative to the tools that any approach will crush it. "Just get it done" works because no consequence is felt, and on the time scale of "most businesses fail within five years", it might never be. When it's large, everyone would prefer to defer to a common format and standard tools. The problems are now complex, have to be discussed and handled by many people, they need documentation and clear boundaries on roles and responsibilities. But common formats and standards are a pyramid of scope creep - eventually it has to support everyone - and along the way, monopolistic organizations vie for control over it in hopes of selling the shovels and pickaxes for the next gold rush. So we end up with a lot of ugly compatibility issues. In effect, the industry is always on this treadmill of hacking together a simple thing, blowing out the complexity, then picking up the pieces and reassembling them into another, slightly cleaner iteration. Maintenance can be done successfully - there are always examples of teams and organizations that succeed - but like with a lot of infrastructure, there's an investment bias towards new builds.