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So I wonder if either of you -- do you kind of agree with that, that we have swung a little bit too far? Do you think it's something else that is kind of like, "Okay, well maybe we should be rethinking our dependencies"? Or is it just like my perspective, like... I've seen this change over my career, and it's just like... |
**Ian Lopshire:** I think we're kind of lucky with Go, because we have such a good standard library. A lot of what you would have to like kind of import from a third party before, you just don't need to. So I think in Go, we might have veered towards the kind of just rewrite it and don't import a dependency, but I thin... |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** \[laughs\] I can add some flavor. I'm not sure if it's so much as sort of the pendulum swinging back and forth... And it very well could be, depending on where you're sitting. But I think generally speaking, whether it be with Go, Ruby, or Rust, or whatever it is, there's a reason why you have th... |
So you need the time element. That's sort of a key ingredient in understanding sort of that pendulum, if you will, to understand where are we now, given this context, and how is it likely to change when things swing back around. And really, as you mature as an engineer, I think that the best thing you can do for yourse... |
\[28:22\] I mean, I remember when -- again, going back to that whole pkg thing - I remember when that was the new hotness. I mean, everybody was putting pkg into every darn Go package. Heck, I did it, because I was just going along with the flow. I'm like, "Oh, yes, some of the most well-respected people in the communi... |
So when I see blog posts around package structure and things like that - and there are a few well-written ones - I always try to understand "What problem are you solving?" Some of the best blog posts on the matter - I think Jon has written one as well, that we'll put in the show notes. I've also seen some well-written ... |
So you could say, "Well, Ben said do this. So all my projects now are going to look like this." Well, no. No. What problem is Ben trying to solve in his blog post? What problem is John trying to solve in his blog? So you have to take context into account. And you have to use time as your friend, as an engineer, to lear... |
So again, the context is going to be what drives you towards one or the other, but you're not going to know that you have options, unless you educate yourself, unless you add time to mix to learn to recognize patterns. |
**Kris Brandow:** Yeah, no, I think that's spot on. I wonder too, I wonder if this is like part of our problem with best practices. The way that a lot of people conceptualize them right now is that it's kind of like -- sometimes it's just kind of like, "Oh, no, just do this thing." Because as you said, like "Oh, these ... |
I feel like Go is kind of unique in this way too, where - when I look at things like the idioms we have, or even things like Go Proverbs, I've never seen them as things where it's just like, "No, shut up and just accept that's true." I feel like they kind of call out to you to and they’re like, "No, no, no... Sit down ... |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** \[32:16\] We have these sort of sayings, these best practices that we've accumulated over years of practice, the software engineering practice. "Don't Repeat Yourself" is a good one; like, DRY, DRY, DRY, DRY all the things, all the time. Man, I violate that rule every single day I write Go code. ... |
But we can't go into projects with sort of this Bible of sayings, be it Go Proverbs, or the Gang of Four Book, or domain-driven design... We can't go into our projects with these seminal works, and expect "Well, I'm just going to throw these books at the problem." Honestly, especially at the early days of a project, I'... |
The only thing I know is -- you know, a manager comes to me and says, "Well, we need a service to take this data from point A to point B." That's all the requirements I have. Now I'm digging through docs, a lot of projects, asking other team members, "Hey, have you seen this thing? Do you know what this thing is?" I'm ... |
I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm not going to approach it as a novice; I'm not going to be shipping something that is not of high quality. The code will be high quality, but the code will not be concerned about design and reusability and architecture and all that stuff. That's the stuff that I do when I know I'm going t... |
It's maddening to think that we can just throw all these best practices at every problem every time, and then we wonder why we can't move fast; because we just stuck designing. |
**Kris Brandow:** Or do you wind up with factory, factory, factory, factory. \[laughter\] "I just took the whole Gang of Four book and started applying it all over my codebase, and now my code is correct. These are all the best practices and the patterns we should be following." Ian, do you have anything you want to ad... |
**Ian Lopshire:** I just want to kind of extract something from what Johnny was saying. I think what's underlying everything he said is thinking what problem am I solving here? You get your proof of concept, and what's my next step? Is it making this available to another team? I'm going to make my decisions based on th... |
**Break:** \[36:26\] |
**Kris Brandow:** Part of what you were saying, Johnny, reminds me of this thing I've been thinking about for the past week. I don't know why I started thinking about it, but it just kind of like popped into my head. Our industry is very good at taking those early prototypes and just kind of shoving them into productio... |
And the thing I was kind of thinking about was like, if you're going to go build an actual product at the end of the day, whether it's a car, or a widget, or whatever, there's the prototype version of it you build, the proof of concept that's like, "Okay, we can do this." But then you have to go and kind of have like a... |
I kind of wonder, do you guys feel that yeah, we are missing that kind of step, or do you think like, "Okay, we don't really need that sort of step", because we're not making a million cars at the end of the day, we're making like a set of features, so that's a completely different thing, and that doesn't really fit th... |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** So the car industry - I'm not from a car industry, so I'm just looking at it as an outsider here; but from what I've noticed, the car industry - they'll have these shows, where they have those sort of beautiful, futuristic-looking designs of automobiles... And you've look at the thing, you’re lik... |
So if we take that exact same analogy and bring it into our world, as software engineers, the purpose of a proof of concept is to have something that proves an idea is possible. It is feasible. The problem we have - and this is something I've noticed and been a part of, unfortunately, many, many times over my career, i... |
And all of a sudden, you're an engineer, you put both hands over your head, you're like, "Nooo...! This is not what I wanted. This is not what this is meant to do." And you argue, and you fight, and you say, "Hey, really, we shouldn't do this. This is not ready for production." You make all the arguments and all the ca... |
\[44:27\] So I think it's an unfortunate place that we're in with proof of concepts, but it's one that I think we've been driven to this state where we as developers are shy, we are afraid that our proof of concepts that are throwaway, what’s meant to be throwaway code will actually end up being thrown into production ... |
**Kris Brandow:** Right. And we also have the engineers, they go through and they make that proof of concept and business asks, "How long till we can put it?" And they're like, "Oh, it's like 80% done." Okay, that might actually be technically true, but that last 20% is the most difficult part of it. So yes, it's not r... |
I think there's a little bit of both playing in there as well. Some people are very like, "Okay, no, we're only going to do this once, and we've got to do it the right way." And you have a whole bunch of other people that are like, "I don't know, we just need to need to build it and go." Ian, I'd be curious to hear you... |
**Ian Lopshire:** Yeah. So only analogy side, I think the equivalent of those production cars, those sample cars you see at the big shows are like the dribble UI mockups. I think that's where those exist. But as far as proof of concepts - I'm at the point where I kind of struggle knowing when a proof of concept is even... |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** If you've never done a thing before... For example, a few years ago I was asked to look into this whole serverless thing. "Is this going to work for our workloads?" and things like that. And I was given a particular problem to solve, and then it says, "Well, can we do it without EC2 Instances?" I... |
I’m like, "Well, now we need to orchestrate", and at the time AWS had Step Functions, which I think pretty closely followed Lambdas. Or at least the use of Step Functions for Lambdas basically became a thing. And then I’m like, "Well, orchestration - yeah, rather than to have one Lambda call another, and then one funct... |
So this is kind of an example that goes that's sort of at perhaps the infrastructure level - to some code level, obviously, because the programming language that you use is going to have an impact on your serverless stuff, no doubt. So if I'm working with a Java project, because of the JVM, and I know that needs to be ... |
\[48:13\] So again, the more you don't know about the kind of problem you solving, the more I think you need a proof of concept. And that goes -- this was an example at that sort of infra level. But if somebody says, "Hey, decode this data stream." Like, I've never seen that before. It's not like anything I've ever see... |
**Kris Brandow:** I guess I would say that I think -- if I'm thinking about this from a writer's perspective, I would say you should always do prototyping and proof of concept. And I think that way because it's like - if I think about how I generally tend to write code versus how I would ideally write something... If I... |
So I'm just going to rough out the idea, quick and dirty, get all of the hearts of it on page, and then start the editing process and refining it and trying to get it all shiny to send out to production or publication. And I feel like that is something we should do with code, and I feel like this is something that I wo... |
Because I think not doing those types of prototypes means that we're kind of cutting down on the number of iterations or the space that we can think of an idea. For me, if I go to write something, and it's like, "Okay, well, I know this will have to go to production", and I spend a bunch of time having to write tests t... |
So that to me seems like one of the failures we've had as an industry, is that we don't encourage people to prototype always. And I think the reason we don't do it is because -- I think at one level, we kind of hold prototyping up on this pedestal, and it's like this fun thing that you get to do. It's what you do when ... |
There's so few lines of code that I've written right the first time that I actually came back a week later and been like, "No, that was the right thing." Actually, I don't think I've ever written code where it's like "I wrote it once and that was it", and then I came back and looked at it and didn't think it was like..... |
I think that's like a practice that maybe we should start introducing into the way we do things, of just, you know, ease the business into it... And be like, "No, no, we have to actually write the code rough and dirty first, get all the small, high-level parts correct, and then we'll go in productionize the code. And t... |
And obviously documentation, too. The amount of code I see in prod that doesn't have a line of documentation, or they add the function name or the type name and then, dot-dot-dot to get around the winter, or whatever thing they could do. I think that part of that is because we don't sit down and we're not like, "Oh, no... |
**Ian Lopshire:** \[52:18\] Yeah, I almost don't think of it as like a proof of concept. I think of it kind of as levels of drafting. Like you said, I guess the first draft is like that proof of concept. I'm going to do it quick and dirty, and make sure it works. And then we go back and make sure we have observability,... |
**Kris Brandow:** Yeah. So I get to move on to the next segment, but Thomas, if you're listening, I hope that we answered your question. And if we got on a meta rant and didn't, I guess we'll just have to do another episode and try to answer your question. But now it is time for unpopular opinions. |
**Jingle:** \[52:54\] to \[53:10\] |
**Kris Brandow:** Alright. Ian, since you are a guest, do you have an unpopular opinion? |
**Ian Lopshire:** I feel like I never do, but... I don't know. I cannot think of a good one. |
**Kris Brandow:** It doesn't have to be good. It just has to be unpopular. |
**Ian Lopshire:** Give me a minute, maybe come back. |
**Kris Brandow:** Okay. I'm sure Johnny has a few. So do you want to share one with us, Johnny? |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** Sure. I mean, I think I've shared quite a few during this episode... I mean, yeah, if I could maybe summarize some of what I guess I hold most dear these days, especially around sort of code organization, is don't organize your code in the beginning. You don't know what you're organizing yet. Jus... |
Obviously, I'm a big fan of domain-driven design. I always keep that in the back of my mind. I don't tend to use sort of frameworky things, generating folders for me, and scaffolding. Again, the type of work I do - I have very little used scaffolding and things, and frameworks, and whatnot. |
But if these are the kinds of problems you're solving, if you're building CRUD apps for a living and you want to use frameworks to generate things, and put files and generate things for you, put them in a folder, and for things to wire up properly you need to put them in a Models folder, and or whatever - I mean, if yo... |
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