Aye. Sign of the times. You're 20+ years in, so I'm preaching to the choir and old-man-yelling-at-cloud here.
Cargo culting + AI are the culprits. Sucks to say, but engineering is going downhill fast. First wave of the shitularity. Architects? Naw, prompt engineers. Barf. Why write good code when a glorified chatbot could do it shittier and faster?
Sign of our times. Cardboard cutout code rather than stonemasonry. Shrinkflation of thought.
Peep this purified downvote fuel:
Everything is bad because everyone is lazy and cargo cults. Web specifically. Full-stop. AI sucks at coding and is making things recursively worse in the long run. LLMs are nothing more than recursive echo chambers of copypasta code that doesn't keep up with API flux.
A great example of this is the original PHP docs, which so, so many of us copypasta'd from, leading to an untold amount of SQL injections. Oopsies.
Simalarily and hunting for downvotes, React is a templating framework that is useful but does not even meet its original value proposition, which is state management in UI. Hilariously tragic. See: original example of message desync state issue on FB. Unsolved for years by the purported solution.
The NoSQL flash is another tragic comedy. Rebuilding the wheel when there is a faster, better wheel already carefully made. Postgres with JSONB.
GraphQL is another example of Stuff We Don't Need But Use Because People Say It's Good. Devs: you don't need it. Just write a query.
-
You mention a hugely important KPI in code. How many files, tools, commands, etc must I touch to do the simplest thing? Did something take me a day when it should have taken 30s? This is rife today, we should all pay attention. Pad left.
Look no further than hooks and contexts in React land for an example. Flawed to begin with, simply because "class is a yucky keyword". I keep seeing this in "fast moving" startups: the diaspora of business logic spread through a codebase, when simplicity and unity is key, which you touch on. Absolute waste of electricity and runway, all thanks to opiniation.
Burnt runways abound. Sometimes I can't help but think engineering needs a turn it off and then on again moment in safe mode without fads and chatbots.
Very cool article. Semantics are important and key. Article nails it.
Reduce, reduce, and then reduce farther.
I'll add my 2c: Ditch the cargo cults. Biggest problem in software dev. I say this 30 years in.
Hard lesson for any young engineers: You don't need X, Y, or Z. It's already been invented. Stop re-inventing. Do so obsessively. You don't GraphQL. You don't need NoSQL. Downvote away.
Pick a language, pick a database, get sleep.
Never trust the mass thought. Cargo culting is world destroying.
Time spent on "incidental complexity" (new features, key fixes, performance) versus time spent on "accidental complexity" (anything and everything else).
Easy metric to understand, easy metric to teach, just remember that it applies to teams and not individuals.
CTEs are extremely useful mechanisms for writing modular and easily maintainable queries, particularly around anything to do with ETL, graphs, and timeseries data. Highly recommend.
TL;DR: Keep your branches up to date. Feature flags are a huge red flag. Constant conflicts and the inability to have long lived branches is indicative of poor architecture and project layout.
Use "rerere" as a bandaid.
Why won't anyone think about the release managers.