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So people also said, "Look, you really need to--" I mean, it's old fashioned and it's almost crazy talk these days, but that you really need to just invest in keeping your developers happy, and wanting them to stay for like maybe seven years, or eight years, or something like that... But again, this is also not how man... |
So as a result -- so I wrote the article based on my presentation to the Dutch electoral board, and it hit Hacker News, and other people... And amazingly, almost everyone agreed with it. It's very rare that that happens. But like 30,000 or 50,000 people read it. And based on that, I got a lot more feedback from people ... |
So it's actually becoming quite a rare skill to build the kind of software that has like safety of life consequences to a bunch of people that will start with downloading the latest JavaScript framework... Even though that might be very nice for your website. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** A lot of great stuff in here. Dependencies, choosing those wisely, keeping it simple, obviously... These are all, I suppose, tried and true; kind of, to some degree, well known. So it's not like you've reinvented the simplistic wheel. You've just sort of collected what might be a good zeitgeist for ... |
**Bert Hubert:** Yeah, I collected very -- it is a list of extremely obvious things. But once sufficient people have sort of forgotten about the obvious things, it starts becoming worth your while to just restate the obvious things, and say "Look, you're not crazy. You're not --" I mean, because many of these things ar... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. |
**Bert Hubert:** I think it was worth restating. Also, it has strengthened the spine of a number of people; it has reinforced them to say, "Look, let's work on keeping it simple. Let's refactor this stuff, and let us not optimize these things before they need to be optimized." |
**Jerod Santo:** \[35:40\] Right. That's a big one. It's easy to get nerd-sniped into premature optimizations. If we just focus on the simplicity part, let's return to dependencies, and maybe talk about that in detail... But I don't think very many people set out to make a complicated solution. Like, it's not -- unless... |
**Bert Hubert:** Yeah. So I would not actually agree that we -- we all say we like simplicity, this is true. But there are, for example, people that take a language standard and see it as a personal challenge to use all of it. |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] Okay... Well, because maybe that demonstrates proficiency. |
**Bert Hubert:** Yeah, yeah. It's like "Look, I'm really good at this stuff... See how complicated this code is." And I think the only people that do this correctly are the people that feel it in their bones. That when they're typing in something complicated, they worry already about the 3am debugging session that's go... |
**Jerod Santo:** They've been burnt before. |
**Bert Hubert:** Yeah. And so I think there are actually a bunch of people that really -- maybe it's controversial, but for example, programming in Rust is all the hype these days, and it has many things going for it... But when I tell people, I say "Look, it's quite a complicated programming language", they actually l... |
So I think the best way of writing simple code is having been on call. That is like the one way of keeping yourself pure, because you know "If I mess this up, if I write this too complicated, it's going to cost me my sleep one day." |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Basically, deal with the mess. You do that in product, you say "Hey, do support for a bit. Hey, if you're an engineer, be on call. Deal with the mess that you create." Because it's pretty easy to write something, throw it over the wall and walk away, because you're not on call. |
**Bert Hubert:** Yeah. And in many organizations, there is actually a physical wall. It's just the people that write the code will never -- they will only indirectly hear about it if there are any problems with it. And that means that there's a natural tendency to keep it simple, because you know you're going to be stu... |
If you put an organizational barrier between dealing with the mess and writing the mess, then it maybe becomes a lot more attractive to try this new style of programming that is like impenetrable. |
**Jerod Santo:** And that goes back to your churn mention as well. Like, if you're only going to work somewhere for 12 to 18 months, unlikely that you're even going to deal with the mess that you're creating, because you moved on to the next organization by the time the mess rears its ugly head. And so you actually may... |
**Bert Hubert:** Yeah, you never had the opportunity to find out. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You may even gotten a bonus because you delivered in such a time frame. |
**Jerod Santo:** Very complicated, yeah. It's so hard. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** The solution's out there, solving the problem, but meanwhile there's something percolating behind the scenes. |
**Jerod Santo:** So ego kind of gets in the way. Like, we want to be clever. |
**Bert Hubert:** Yeah. And sometimes I write code that is so embarrassingly simple, and I'm like "It cannot possibly be enough." And then like five years later, you go "Well, apparently it was simple enough. Apparently, it was good enough." |
And there's also this anticipatory thing. For my parliamentary monitoring system, I have a very interesting situation that in parliament are like seven or eight different kind of important entities. There are meetings, there are documents, there are appointments... And seven or eight - the tricky thing about that is ca... |
\[40:07\] And you could write this lovely generic solution where you could have thousands of different kinds of entities in there, but it would be quite complicated. But because there are only seven or eight entities, it is not always necessary to build this sort of generic solution, but it does feel a little bit bad i... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. YAGNI just rears its ugly head. So I've had this - have you had this before Bert? ...where it's like, I want to create a simple solution, I go ahead and do that, I put it out in the world, and it's too simple, because the world's actually more complicated than my software will handle. And then, ... |
**Bert Hubert:** Yeah. So there's one sort of telling story... So I also wrote PowerDNS, which is a name server... And we started PowerDNS in 1999. And DNS evolved over time, and it added cryptography to it DNSSEC. And initially, PowerDNS started out really simple, and then the world turned out to be complicated, and w... |
And it's very tricky as an organization to allow yourself to say "No, we're going to clean up the mess." So we're not going to do this big, hairy -- we're not going to do version two syndrome, where we say "No, we're going to make the best version ever, that will be so generic that it deals with everything", because it... |
Back when we used -- for example, in PowerDNS we used simple strings to deal with domain names. It turns out domain names only look like strings. They actually have more complicated semantics than that. So within PowerDNS, the big thing we did, we said "Look, we're going to rip out all the strings, and we're going to m... |
**Jerod Santo:** Did this turn into a business? Was this making money at the time? |
**Bert Hubert:** Yes, it turned into a good business... Actually, PowerDNS is a rare example of a fully open source piece of software that actually turned into a commercial success, while still remaining mostly open source. |
**Jerod Santo:** So were there pressures on the money side to like not do that? |
**Bert Hubert:** Yeah, there were... Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[43:59\] Of course... |
**Bert Hubert:** But you have to sort of have a little holistic view on that, because it turns out that we could have focused on where we were making all the money. But it turns out that the reason we got paying customers was that the technical community liked what we were doing. They would recommend us everywhere. So ... |
So it was, in the end, a solid business decision for us, to say "We're going to give ourselves a year to clean this stuff up." And I dare say that if we had not done that, the company would have gone bust later on, because it would have collapsed under its own complexity. But I do not find a lot of other examples, wher... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's rare. |
**Jerod Santo:** The only one I could think of is Snow Leopard, which was Apple's version of macOS that was touted as having no new features, even though there were a few features in there... But it was an entire release cycle, all focused on stability, refactoring, performance. |
**Bert Hubert:** Yeah, wow. Great. |
**Jerod Santo:** And it is, to this day, many people's favorite version of macOS, going back -- everyone's like "Yeah, Snow Leopard was awesome." |
**Bert Hubert:** Yeah. Well, I think as a concept it's doing a spring cleaning. We do it for other things. I mean, in equipment you do this kind of maintenance, where you replace the load-bearing parts, and take it out of service for a bit. So yeah... But it's not very popular. I mean, mostly you see people just having... |
**Jerod Santo:** It reminds me of something mechanics say, that I learned recently. They say "If you don't schedule your maintenance, then your car will schedule it for you." |
**Bert Hubert:** Yeah, exactly. That's actually also part of the blog post I wrote on software maintenance. |
**Jerod Santo:** Oh, is that where I read it? Okay. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[laughs\] |
**Bert Hubert:** That's probably where you read it. |
**Jerod Santo:** I love it. |
**Bert Hubert:** The thing, I put it in there -- I got it from an Australian guy, and he said "If you have dependencies in your software, schedule some time, maybe every quarter, just to take a look at all your dependencies. How are they doing? Are they still being maintained? Are the security releases coming out? Has ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
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