Post-Architecture: Premature Abstraction Is the Root of All Evil

Nowadays, companies tend to pitch their business models of siloed and quasi innovative problem-solving technology. The whole idea of specialization and offering solutions to particular problems has been haunting us since the time of Adam Smith. Somehow, people seem to forget that no problem arises in isolation. Do we even consider anymore that for ... See more

All non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky.

Bad code gives you feedback, perfect code doesn’t. Err on the side of writing bad code

It’s really easy to write terrible code. But it’s also really easy to write code that follows absolutely every best practice, which has been unit, integration, fuzz, and mutation-tested for good measure – your startup will just run out of money before you finish.... See more

Another observation I’ve made is that starting with a performant core can ultimately drastically simplify the architecture of a software project, relative to a given level of functionality.

There are idiosyncrasies of software development that are invariant even as technique and technology improves, and so you are bound to recapitulate these patterns eventually.