The best codebase I have ever seen and collaborated on was also boring as fuck.
Small, immutable modules.
Every new features was coded by extension (the ‘o’ in S.O.L.I.D)
All dependencies were resolved by injection.
All the application life cycle was managed by configurable scopes.
There was absolutely no boiler plate except for the initial injectors.
All of the tests were brain-dead and took very minimal effort to write. Tests served both as documentation and specification for modules.
“Refactoring” was as simple as changing a constructor or a configuration file.
All the input/output of the modules were configurable streams.
There is more to it, but basically, it was a very strict codebase, and it used a lot of opinionated libraries. Not an easy codebase to understand if you’re a newbie, but it was absolutely brain dead to maintain and extend on.
Coding actually took very little time of our day, most of it consisted of researching the best tech or what to add next. I think the codebase was objectively strictly better than all other similar software I’ve seen and worked on. We joked A LOT when it came time to change something in the app pretending it would take weeks and many 8 pointers, then we’d casually make the change while joking about it.
It might sound mythical and bullshity, and it wasn’t perfect, it should be said that dependency injection often come in the form of highly opinionated frameworks, but it really felt like what software development should be. It really felt like engineering, boring and predictable, every PO dreams.
That being said, I given up trying to convince people that having life-cycle logic are over the place and fetching dependencies left and right always lead to chaos. Unfortunately I cannot really tell you guys what the software was about because I am not allowed to, but there was a lot of moving parts (hence why we decided to go with this approach). I will also reiterate that it was boring as fuck. If anything, my hot take would be that most programmers are subconsciously lying to themselves, and prefer to code whatever it is they like, instead of what the codebase need, and using whatever tool they like, instead of the tools the project and the team need. Programming like and engineer is not “fun”, programming like a cowboy and ignoring the tests is a whole lot of fun.
This! Software engineering suggests a certain professionalism wich unfortunately is hard to find. From an accessibility point of view I am simply not able to participate in these cowboy style events for I do not have the mental capacity to do so. Ironically I have been able to work more effectively than others by focussing on quality.
Coincidentally I published some of my work earlier this week. It’s an opinionated library dictating the structure of your core domain. In return it completely decouples infrastructure. This way you do not really have to touch infra at all during day to day operations, which simplifies things immensely! As the domain exists at the very core of most software projects, it greatly impacts the way everything else is designed as well.
I never got so far, but had a system built which some parts of what you described. It was incredibly relaxing to develop with it. Our take as a team was: boring is better, we don’t want to be paged on weekends.
The best codebase I have ever seen and collaborated on was also boring as fuck.
There is more to it, but basically, it was a very strict codebase, and it used a lot of opinionated libraries. Not an easy codebase to understand if you’re a newbie, but it was absolutely brain dead to maintain and extend on.
Coding actually took very little time of our day, most of it consisted of researching the best tech or what to add next. I think the codebase was objectively strictly better than all other similar software I’ve seen and worked on. We joked A LOT when it came time to change something in the app pretending it would take weeks and many 8 pointers, then we’d casually make the change while joking about it.
It might sound mythical and bullshity, and it wasn’t perfect, it should be said that dependency injection often come in the form of highly opinionated frameworks, but it really felt like what software development should be. It really felt like engineering, boring and predictable, every PO dreams.
That being said, I given up trying to convince people that having life-cycle logic are over the place and fetching dependencies left and right always lead to chaos. Unfortunately I cannot really tell you guys what the software was about because I am not allowed to, but there was a lot of moving parts (hence why we decided to go with this approach). I will also reiterate that it was boring as fuck. If anything, my hot take would be that most programmers are subconsciously lying to themselves, and prefer to code whatever it is they like, instead of what the codebase need, and using whatever tool they like, instead of the tools the project and the team need. Programming like and engineer is not “fun”, programming like a cowboy and ignoring the tests is a whole lot of fun.
This! Software engineering suggests a certain professionalism wich unfortunately is hard to find. From an accessibility point of view I am simply not able to participate in these cowboy style events for I do not have the mental capacity to do so. Ironically I have been able to work more effectively than others by focussing on quality.
Coincidentally I published some of my work earlier this week. It’s an opinionated library dictating the structure of your core domain. In return it completely decouples infrastructure. This way you do not really have to touch infra at all during day to day operations, which simplifies things immensely! As the domain exists at the very core of most software projects, it greatly impacts the way everything else is designed as well.
Oh, very interesting! I bookmarked it thanks for sharing!
Bookmarked. Thanks!
I never got so far, but had a system built which some parts of what you described. It was incredibly relaxing to develop with it. Our take as a team was: boring is better, we don’t want to be paged on weekends.