The Grug Brained Developer (2022)

So many gems in here but this one about microservices is my favorite:

grug wonder why big brain take hardest problem, factoring system correctly, and introduce network call too

I'm convinced that some people don't know any other way to break down a system into smaller parts. To these people, if it's not exposed as a API call it's just some opaque blob of code that cannot be understood or reused.

> To these people, if it's not exposed as a API call it's just some opaque blob of code that cannot be understood or reused.

I think this is correct as an explanation for the phenomenon, but it's not just a false perception on their part: for a lot of organizations it is actually true that the only way to preserve boundaries between systems over the course of years is to stick the network in between. Without a network layer enforcing module boundaries code does, in fact, tend to morph into a big ball of mud.

I blame a few things for this:

1. Developers almost universally lack discipline.

2. Most programming languages are not designed to sufficiently account for #1.

It's not a coincidence that microservices became popular shortly after Node.js and Python became the dominant web backend languages. A strong static type system is generally necessary (but not sufficient) to create clear boundaries between modules, and both Python and JavaScript have historically been even worse than usual for dynamic languages when it comes to having a strong modularity story.

And while Python and JS have it worse than most, even most of our popular static languages are pretty lousy at giving developers the tools needed to clearly delineate module boundaries. Rust has a pretty decent starting point but it too could stand to be improved.