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.

I swear I'm not making this up; a guy at my current client needed to join two CSV files. A one off thing for some business request. He wrote a REST api in Java, where you get the merged csv after POSTing your inputs.

I must scream but I'm in a vacuum. Everyone is fine with this.

(Also it takes a few seconds to process a 500 line test file and runs for ten minutes on the real 20k line input.)

I mean, it would be faster to just import them into an in-memory sqlite database, run a `union all` query and then dump it to a csv...

That's still probably the wrong way to do it, but 10 minutes for a 20k line file? That seems like poor engineering in the most basic sense.

It's a twenty line bash script. Pipe some shit into sqlite, done.

But the guy 'is known to get the job done' apparently.

Maybe he’s recognized something brilliant. Management doesn’t know that the program he wrote was just a reimplementation of the Unix “cut” and “paste” commands, so he might as well get rewarded for their ignorance.

And to be fair, if folks didn’t get paid for reinventing basic Unix utilities with extra steps, the economy would probably collapse.

Clearly I'm the dumbass in this story, as we're all paid by the hour...