Duplication Isn't Always an Anti-Pattern

I had the pleasure of Sandi Metz coming to a company I worked for and going us a “boot camp” of sorts for all of the engineering principles she espouses and it had a profound impact on how I view software development. Whatever the company paid for her to come - it was worth every penny.

“Prefer duplication over the wrong abstraction”

Sandi’s books and conference talks are excellent. My faves:

https://www.poodr.com/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJjHfa5yxlU

Poodr is one of the best programming books ever written. Even if you don’t program in Ruby you should read it anyway (and pick up a bit of Ruby just for fun) because there are lots of great concepts to internalize that are useful in almost all programming languages.

Couldn't agree more!

You develop a sense for when the time is right over the years, by maintaining over engineered pieces of shit, many written by yourself.

To beginners it seems like coming up with the idea and building it is the difficult part; it isn't, not even close. The only difficult parts worth mentioning is keeping complexity on a tight leash and maintaining conceptual integrity.