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by vinceguidry 2059 days ago
Manage the complexity, yeah. Solve it? Well, if you’re managing complexity, you’re not really solving it, are you?

Heavy lifting needs to be done with code. If your config layer is growing, I would look for why that is and how you could push the complexity to the code or data and “boil down” the config until it can be represented with just keys and values.

Growing config means there’s areas of your application that aren’t being properly encapsulated. But once something is enshrined as config then it usually never will get treated as a legitimate application concern, worthy of a data model and a UI for changing it. Devs just keep adding onto it and before you know it you need a whole team just to deal with it.