[hinkley]

I’m currently wrestling with a thing at work where someone wrapped a frameworkish library with their own abstraction. Now I’m trying to add a cross-cutting concern that neither my coworker nor the authors thought about, and so instead of punching through three layers of inadequate data passing I’ve got six to deal with and a stutter as well (builder patterns are great, except when they are not).

Having this new failure mode added to all the other ones I’ve already met over the last few decades has colored my perception a bit, and I’m having opinions about how you shouldn’t try to wrap a wrapper, and maybe the best way to live with a bad API is to pass through the yucky bit as quickly as possible - preprocess to see if you can avoid calling it at all, and then avoid asking it to do anything extra the rest of the time.

That part doesn’t feel that transformative to me but maybe I’m wrong. What’s bigger and stickier for me is that I now have to think about some NIH code we wrote that deeply bothers me, and decide if I still don’t like it, or if the author had the same conclusion and this was their answer.