Tag: pattern

Dreaming in Code

I’ve just recently purchased a new book, Dreaming in Code, by Scott Rosenberg.

It’s a good read, so far, but I’m only on page 100 or so, so I got a ways to go. Still, I’ve got to chime in right now because I’ve heard and/or read this before and I think it’s bullshit:

Here, once more, was the archetypal dilemma of software reuse. Build or borrow? Virtually every software project sooner or later arrives at this fork in the road. (The full phrase traditionally is “Build, buy, or borrow?” From a technical perspective, though, “buy” and “borrow” are similar, the commercial and open source sides of the same coin.)

Look, I don’t give a damn if you’re the most productive developer or architect in the universe, if you have a solution that fits your needs but perhaps only to 80% and you ain’t buying or borrowing, then you really shouldn’t be in charge of the project. Do yourself and your employer (or client, as the case may be) and focus on technology and let somebody do project management because you suck at it.

Bottom line is: write an interface. Then have the implementation of this interface be a simple adapter to some borrowed or purchased code. If you have time to make it better in the future, then plug in a new implementation. If you rewrite because you ain’t getting that last 20%, then you’re a fool. If you’re at this fork in the road, realize that you currently have 0%, and that you can probably crank out an adapter within a couple of days. 80% of the desired functionality within a few man/days. You have to be smoking something if you don’t follow that path!

Yes, I’m fairly extreme in my views on this, but I’ve found that I’m always right when it comes to this issue, too.

Note to Self: Use session token as argument across all your APIs.

If you’re gonna be running code on any kind of multithreaded environment, a service layer of any kind, whatever… In other words, unless you’re actually running on the GUI and you’re actually dealing with event-driven development… please please please add a session token as an argument to every method call in your API.

You probably will think: “Why? I don’t need it.” But if and when you do, it might be too late… because you might be live at several clients, and you may not be able to change the API at that point in time, or you have to be backward compatible, right? Well, if you ever plan on having two-phase commit, or horizontal access permissions, whatever… you better have some kind of session token that allows you to retrieve your “context.” If you don’t have that, you’ll hack it…. oooohhhh, you’ll hack it real good, because you won’t have a choice. But you know what? If you ever want a clean fix: you’re shit out of luck!