Comment on Taco Bell Programming
geekworking@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
This is great until your job outgrows a single computer or you want to have redundancy. Also, chains of bash tools don’t have the best error management when something chokes in one of the middle steps in the pipe. You can still leverage simple bash tools for a lot of the under the hood stuff, but you start needing something more to act as the glue petty quickly when you scale. KISS should still apply.
vinniep@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
I think that’s the point. Don’t jump to the complex right away. Keep it simple and compose the capabilities you have readily available until you need to become more complex. When the task requires it, yeah, do the complex thing, but keep the simplicity mandate in mind and only add the new complexity that you need. You can get pretty far with the simple, and what about all of the situations where that future pivot or growth never happens?
The philosophy strikes a cord with me - I’m often contending with teams that are building for the future complexities that they think might come up, and we realize later that we did get complexity in the problem later, but not the kind we had planned for, so all of that infrastructure and planning was wasted on an imaginary problem that no only didn’t help us but often actually make our task harder. The trick is to keep the solution set composable and flexible so that if complexity shows up later, we can reconfigure and build the new capabilities that we need rather than having to maneuver a large complicated system that we built on a white board before we really knew what the problem looked like.