Cognitive load is what matters

This article makes me feel weird.

I think I'm not smart enough for it. I can't really take anything new away from it, mainly just a message of "we're smart people, and trust us when we say smart things are bad. All the smart sounding stuff you learned about how to program from smart sounding people like us? Lol, that's all wrong now."

Okay, I get the cognitive load is bad, so what's the solution?

"Just do simple dumb stuff, duh." Oh, right... Useful.

The problem is never just the code, or the architecture, or the business, or the cognitive load. It's the mismatch of those things against the people expected to work with them.

Walk into a team full of not-simple engineers, and tell them all what they've been doing is wrong, and they need to just write simple code, some of them will fail, some will walk out, and you'll be no closer to a solution.

I wish I knew of the tech world before 20 years ago, where technical roles were long and stable enough for teams to build their own understanding of a suitable level of complexity. Without that, churn means we all have to aim for the lowest common denominator.

> Okay, I get the cognitive load is bad, so what's the solution?

Modularity.

Each component in your system should be a (relatively) simple composition of other (smaller) components, in such a way that each component can be understood as a black box, and is interchangable with any other implementation or the same thing.

From the article:

> All too often, we end up creating lots of shallow modules, following some vague "a module should be responsible for one, and only one, thing" principle.

This is what I'm talking about: this writing is too smart for me, because I can't take any simple answers from it like "modularity" without feeling another part of the article contradicts it with other smart sounding ways of saying don't listen to smart stuff.