Keep. It. Simple.

Voice of the DBA

I get a tech newsletter most days, which has news that I enjoy, but interspersed among the news and ads are projects, frameworks, or repos, most of which I’ve never heard of before. I used to read these, but it seems that there is an endless list of these, which all have marketing descriptions that somehow claim this set of code solves problems that others don’t or that this code is easy to use and integrate with, or well, I don’t know what other promises. I’m usually turned off by the end of the first sentence.

The thing I’ve noticed is that there are so many projects out there. Even in the database space, if I happen to read a discussion on some aspect of databases, such as database deployment frameworks, I’ll see links to technologies I’ve never heard of in my life. Some are small projects, and some are small companies, but there is an amazing variety of solutions for any tech problem. I’m not sure most of them are much different from the others, but the Not Invented Here syndrome seems to be everywhere. These observations also remind me of just how vast the world is and how little I see of it on a daily basis.

I ran across an article recently on simplifying the way we build software. In this instance, the authors focused on the complexity of JavaScript frameworks, with a number of authors/developers/consultants saying they limit their use of frameworks and try to keep to simple technologies. There is a quote that I find myself agreeing with and disagreeing with at the same time from David Heinemeier Hansson: “The merchants of complexity will try to convince you that you can’t do anything yourself these days. You can’t do auth, you can’t do scale, you can’t run a database, you can’t connect a computer to the internet. You’re a helpless peon who should just buy their wares. No. Reject.”

I do think that many frameworks, products, etc. are very complex and there is a cost to using them. They can be overwhelming and hard to teach to others, and those costs can outweigh the benefits. The costs could be actual money or they could be the time it takes to learn, integrate, and teach the technology to others. Any change you make to your architecture will have impacts that you haven’t considered, and it will slow down your agility. Adding new technology does the same thing.

At the same time, some things are hard. Auth is hard. Lots of people struggle with this and Troy Hunt has made a good living at https://haveibennpwned.com/ pointing out all the poor decisions people have made. Including a bunch of them that use the auth provided by some tech stack. Running databases is hard. Can you run one? Sure. Will you run it well as your app grows? Experience shows me most of you can’t. Can you set up a simple backup strategy? Of course, but that doesn’t matter. You being able to restore things is what matters. There are plenty more examples of tech problems or failures that companies run into as they build and scale software. There are also plenty of examples where using a framework saves a bunch of time for development teams. Look at mobile apps, most of them are based on some framework because learning all the ins and outs of iOS and Android is too hard for most people.

For. Most. People.

DNN can do a lot of things that most people can’t. He’s very talented and smart. Lots of organizations have one or two very talented people, but they also have a lot of average people. They struggle to teach and train them things, and ultimately, they don’t want to spend time teaching everyone about how to manage CSS or auth a user from a service or deploy changes to a database. They want a framework that makes it simple for the ever-changing staff to get work done related to their business, which is more often than not building software. They need to build software, but they need the software built to serve their customers in some way. That’s their goal, serving customers.

I am all for keeping things simple. I want to minimize the number of technologies we use, and I want to limit the training time it takes to get people productive. However, I don’t want to build everything myself because I’m not sure I can, and I certainly know I don’t to go to that much effort.

Steve Jones

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