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It never fails to amaze me how little we learn from the past. I wish I knew if it was unique to software development or all industries suffer from this level of

It never fails to amaze me how little we learn from the past. I wish I knew if it was unique to software development or all industries suffer from this level of hubris. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month

nine_k 2y ago
I think Joel is a bit extremist here. IIRC EBay rewrote their backend three times. It was not because the previous version was wrong, but because they were growing and changing, so a new backend was needed anyway to tackle that. They were and are doing fine. Twitter rewrote their codebase from Ruby on Rails (the endless source of fail whales) to a completely different platform, again due to the huge growth. Technology-wise, they are doing pretty fine. Facebook rewrote Messenger from a very thick and complex client architecture to an outrageously lightweight and flexible architecture based on eventual consistency / roughly-CRDT approach. FB Messenger is doing very fine. Never rewrite your codebase without a really good reason. Big wins in performance, maintainability, and ease of development may be good reasons, depending on your situation.
- theshrike79 2y ago
  Rewriting a backend is easier, because you can use a Strangler Fig[0] pattern to replace it bit by bit. The customers don't even have to notice. With a browser you really can't do that, because you can't force users to update and then you'd have a bunch of semi-working Frankenstein monsters in the wild. A full rewrite and release is the only option. [0] https://martinfowler.com/bliki/StranglerFigApplication.html https://martinfowler.com/bliki/StranglerFigApplication.html
hnthrow90348765 2y ago
Well, it's Elon and DOGE, so you can't exactly start with assuming it's made in good faith and they simply haven't learned

nine_k 2y ago

I think Joel is a bit extremist here. IIRC EBay rewrote their backend three times. It was not because the previous version was wrong, but because they were growing and changing, so a new backend was needed anyway to tackle that. They were and are doing fine. Twitter rewrote their codebase from Ruby on Rails (the endless source of fail whales) to a completely different platform, again due to the huge growth. Technology-wise, they are doing pretty fine. Facebook rewrote Messenger from a very thick and complex client architecture to an outrageously lightweight and flexible architecture based on eventual consistency / roughly-CRDT approach. FB Messenger is doing very fine. Never rewrite your codebase without a really good reason. Big wins in performance, maintainability, and ease of development may be good reasons, depending on your situation.

theshrike79 2y ago
Rewriting a backend is easier, because you can use a Strangler Fig[0] pattern to replace it bit by bit. The customers don't even have to notice. With a browser you really can't do that, because you can't force users to update and then you'd have a bunch of semi-working Frankenstein monsters in the wild. A full rewrite and release is the only option. [0] https://martinfowler.com/bliki/StranglerFigApplication.html https://martinfowler.com/bliki/StranglerFigApplication.html

hnthrow90348765 2y ago

Well, it's Elon and DOGE, so you can't exactly start with assuming it's made in good faith and they simply haven't learned