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In my experience, I've always found the devil to be in the [late] details. I have learned (the hard way), that, no matter how far I go down the rabbithole, in architecture, I am never a match for Reality. I. Just. Can't. Plan. For. Everything. I've learned to embrace the suck, so to speak. I admit that I don't know how things will turn out, once I get into the bush, so I try to design flexible architectures. Flexibility sometimes comes as abstractions; forming natural "pivot points," but it can also come from leaving some stuff to be "dealt with later," and segmenting the architecture well enough to allow these to be truly autonomous. That can mean a modular architecture, with whitebox "APIs," between components. People are correct in saying that OO can lead to insane codeballs, but I find that this is usually because someone thought they had something that would work for everything, and slammed into some devilish details, down the road, and didn't want to undo the work they already did. I have learned to be willing to throw out weeks worth of work, if I determine the architecture was a bad bet. It happens a lot less, these days, than it used to. Hurts like hell, but I've found that it is often beneficial to do stuff I don't want to do. A couple of years ago, I threw out an almost-complete app, because it was too far off the beam. The rewrite works great, and has been shipping since January. Anyway, I have my experience, and it often seems to be very different from that of others. I tend to be the one going back into my code, months, or years, after I wrote it, so I've learned to leave stuff that I like; not what someone else says it should be like, or that lets me tick off a square in Buzzword Bingo. My stuff works, ships, and lasts (sometimes, for decades). |