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Duplication Isn't Always an Anti-Pattern

(medium.com)
52 points birdculture | 1 comments | 02 Dec 25 08:58 UTC | HN request time: 0.194s | source
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jamesbelchamber ◴[07 Dec 25 14:50 UTC] No.46182053[source]▶
"Don't Repeat Yourself" is a great rule of thumb which, at least in writing Terraform configuration, became absolute tyranny. Strange webs of highly coupled code with layers of modules, all in an effort to be DRY - almost everywhere I've seen Terraform.

Trying to explain why a little duplication is preferable to bad abstractions, and specifically preferable to tightly coupling two unrelated systems together because they happened to sort-of interact with the same resource, was endless and tiring and - ultimately - often futile.

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1. hinkley ◴[07 Dec 25 16:33 UTC] No.46182935[source]▶
On the terraform comment, things that change together ship together is a good mantra.

If you keep having to make edits in two independent systems every time you want to make one change, something is wrong. If you’re leaving footguns around because changing one thing affects two or more systems, but you aren’t at liberty to change them both in production, that’s also something wrong.