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 keep trying to explain this to tiny dev teams (1-2 people) that will cheerfully take a trivial web app with maybe five forms and split it up into “microservices” that share a database, an API Management layer, a queue for batch jobs to process “huge” volumes (megabytes) of data, an email notification system, an observablity platform (bespoke!) and then… and then… turn the trivial web forms into a SPA app because “that’s easier”.

Now I understand that “architecture” and “patterns” is a jobs program for useless developers. It’s this, or they’d be on the streets holding a sign saying “will write JavaScript for a sandwich”.

It's all they've seen. They don't get why they're doing it, because they're junior devs masquerading as architects. There's so many 'senior' or 'architect' level devs in our industry who are utterly useless.

One app I got brought in late on the architect had done some complicated mediator pattern for saving data with a micro service architecture. They'd also semi-implemented DDD.

It was a ten page form. Literally that was what it was supposed to replace. An existing paper, 10 page, form. One of those "domains" was a list of the 1,000 schools in the country. That needed to be updated once a year.

A government spent millions on this thing.

I could have done it on my todd in 3 months. It just needed to use simple forms, with some simple client side logic for hiding sections, and save the data with an ORM.

The funniest bit was when I said that it couldn't handle the load because the architecture had obvious bottlenecks. The load was known and fairly trivial (100k form submissions in one month).

The architect claimed that it wasn't possible as the architecture was all checked and approved by one of the big 5.

So I brought the test server down during the call by making 10 requests at once.

> They'd also semi-implemented DDD.

One of my pet-peeves. "We're doing DDD, hexagonal architecture, CQRS". So, when was the last time your dev team had a conversation with your domain experts? You have access to domain experts don't you? What does your ubiquitous language look like?

So no, some "senior" read a blog post (and usually just diagonally) and ran with it and now monkey see monkey does is in full effect.

And you get the same shit with everything. How many "manager" read one of the books about the method they tell you they're implementing (or any book about management) ? How many TDD shop where QA and dev are still separate silos? How many CI/CD with no test suite at all? Kanban with no physical board, no agreed upon WIP limits, no queue replenishing system but we use the Kanban board in JIRA.