[pdimitar]

You already got a very solid reply. I'll add only one prescription that I found true in all my ~20 years of career:

Write code in a way that everybody can understand it, even managers.

That's it. There's no magic. Code is read MUCH more often than it's written. You have to optimize for it being readable.

This does NOT mean the shortest possible code. I've seen people go to that extreme and it never ends well. But it also doesn't mean every variable has to be called "user_in_a_context_of_private_temporary_login" either.

Truth is, writing understandable and readable code as a skill goes well beyond programming. You will find the same skill in well-articulated presenters, book authors and lawyers.

So just this one advice should be your guiding star: write your code as if you will have a stroke tomorrow and will suffer amnesia and you would still be able to understand your own code very quickly afterwards.

[m110]

Well, this is bascially what DDD proposes. To write code that reflects the domain, so even your manager understands it. But for some reason, when you call it by a name, people start saying you don’t need those dogmatic patterns. That’s my point.

[pdimitar]

Not what I observed. When DDD is mentioned, a lot of people want to abstract the entire Universe just in case.

DDD sadly often goes hand in hand with a ton of enterprise Java-like practices that never ended well for anyone applying them. It's one of the collective delusions that's apparently too persistent to disappear by itself.

Resisting the temptation to abstract everything behind factories / config providers / dependency injectors et. al. is a crucial skill in programming and project management. Most people fall to the temptation however.

[m110]

This is what the article mentions. It’s not about the tactical patterns, but the strategic ones.

DDD is absolutely not about factories or dependency injection. It seems like you mix up Java with OOP design patterns and DDD and treat them all like the same thing. They’re not.

[pdimitar]

Think we're talking past each other a bit. :)

I am not mixing those up. Even when I only had 3-4 years of experience I was very keenly aware they are separate things. But 90% of the people I worked with did mix them up and forced their decisions on me.

I know DDD can be applied sparingly and to produce common-sense code that can be easily read by (almost) anyone and it's what I strive to do for years every working day.

What I was saying is: it's an uphill battle against the mob rule of a lot of people who get easily hyped and lack analytical and critical thinking skills and just blindly apply every single enterprise pattern they've read in a book.

To that end I somewhat agree with the article -- but not completely.