| I sure hope we can get to a happier software harmony, of enjoying code and systems. One of the recurring trends thats cropped up is so called barefoot developers, folks just cobbling together some kind of task not for big industrial software with millions or even dozens of users, but just because it makes their lives or a small group of people's lives better. Maggie Appleton recently followed up with a post saying that these are the folks ML/LLMs might best be able to help. To get them their stuff. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40633029 https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software But I also have this feeling, that almost all the webdev we do is artisanal handcraft as is. We hand author endpoint after endpoint for our objects even though there's this high degree of similarity across endpoints; authorize/validate the request, do the thing in the db, return it to the user. Part of me is sick as shit of just how artisanal software is; it stinks like rot that we keep cranking out more piles of code for each entity & as we intricate/complicate/embellish each entity/resource. We so rarely have broader high level systems where we've escaped from hand crafting web server middle tier glorified-translators of a very basic 3-tirr client-server-db architecture. I just want companies to pay me to tell them how much less they could do, if they let me PoC their system in something ordered & higher order, such as Hasura. Like CORBA, the UML world also has great scorn as unmaintainable, but again it's like, those folks felt on to something amazing & mighty & we have immense unsurvivor anti-bias, we are pat & confident that this tower of babel built too high & all future towers too will fall & that the effort is folly. But man, the chaos & lines of code we have been creating as an industry is just so unnecessary & so out of control. |
Yes I’ve coded permission systems a hundred times. But here it’s wired to the app we integrate with, and here it’s wired with groups. Here it’s by document, here it’s by space. A thousand hoops, never the same exact logic. Like a thousand humans, never the same identical one. We humans can see the same parts and easily designate “a human”, but this pattern recognition ignores a lot of important details. And those details are what makes IT accurate and reproducible, which has been the trait we’ve liked about it.
Since 1970, have we misled ourselves in believing we were repeating the same patterns, while in fact, every program really was different?