Good Articles

This is a fun project and neither a good nor convenient solution to a problem. Better solutions exist. There is not much sense in this project, although it can facilitate testing ClickHouse. You could argue that modern AI, for example, Riffusion, can do a better job. The counterargument is - if you enjoy what you are doing, it's better not to care if someone does it better but with less pleasure.

Then a few days later, after thinking about it a lot, I have a response.

People say that your first reaction is the most honest, but I disagree. Your first reaction is usually outdated. Either it’s an answer you came up with long ago and now use instead of thinking, or it’s a knee-jerk emotional response to something in your past.

Before you write any code — ask if you could ever possibly want multiple kinds of the thing you are coding. If yes, just do it. Now, not later.

Pagination. To quote Simon Willison, co-creator of Django, “Refactoring an existing non-paginated API to support pagination will break everything. Better to fake pagination but only ever return a single page, just in case”.

I’ve done this refactoring a million times. I’ll be like, I thought there would only ever be one subscription team, user plan, name, address , and it always ends up being like, “Oh, actually there’s more.” I almost never go the other way. What if you just paid the upfront cost of thinking “This is just always a collection”?

It is a LOT easier to scale code from a cardinality of 2 to 3 than it is to refactor from a cardinality of 1 to 2. This is a fundamentally under-appreciated nonlinearity. In other words, Preemptive Pluralization can make the difference between “sure, I’ll add that today” and “this is going to take us 2 months and we’ll introduce merge conflicts with every other in-progress feature.”

If a small, typical feature request can throw your whole design out of whack, then you have fragile code. Clearly you want the opposite of fragile — I am tempted to call it “Antifragile” because that gets clicks — but really the best you can hope for is code that mostly doesn’t fall apart due to 1-2 standard deviation changes in requirements. In other words: robust code. Robust code is optimized for change (more in a future blogpost).

More awkward things to pluralize: Single tenant open source -> Multi tenant hosted service Versions -> from no version to v1/v2, or going from “legacy”/“new” to “new new” (hence Stripe just uses dates) Number of independently shipping frontends in your company (hence module federation) Number of clouds in your company (you think you will avoid this… until you can’t, per the Hashimoto lemma)

More from @nivertech on Twitter: in-memory→persistent single node→cluster single language→i18n no pagination→pagination single user→multi-user single tenant→multi-tenant single branding→white-labeled free→paid hard-coded configs→separate config from code hard-coded features→feature flags online-first→offline-first web-first→mobile-first no 3rd party API→API-first DB-specific→ORM local desktop SW→Client/Server Client/Server→P2P Centralized→Decentralized Static→Dynamic SSG→SPA

In fairness to myself, I’ve also come into contact with many other people who struggle with this. I can’t count how many people I’ve worked with who casually made requests for significant changes to other peoples’ work, often for spurious benefit and with horribly inopportune timing. Funnily enough, those are the exact people who I’ve historically avoided debating with, either due to a (often mistaken) belief that they simply knew better, or due to an (often correct) understanding that these people are just not worth debating. I hope that someday my career rewards me for at least thinking about whether it’s worth having certain debates, because it would break my heart to find out that what society really values are those sorts of inconsiderate boor.

I’ve just as frequently seen unthinking accession to other peoples’ decisions go just as poorly. I’ve seen this referred to as “false harmony” in management articles, and it can mean that teams fall into bad patterns just for the sake of collegiality.

People who try to present as supremely confident3 will often seek conflict (or at least domination) in trivial matters. People who outwardly present as low in confidence will often avoid open disagreement, even when they have meritorious doubts about an issue. This can, over time, destabilize organizations.

At some point in their careers, most engineers come to a realization: we are not rewarded for linear outputs. Most engineers will tell you that the transition from a junior engineer to a senior engineer, or the truly transformational work in our careers, does not come from just crushing tickets non-stop for extended periods of time. Similarly, these transitions don’t come from implementing some n+1 product feature that you’re told is very important. Instead, engineers are most valued6, and therefore most rewarded, for non-linear impacts.

As a concrete example, I would rather implement a self-service e-commerce platform for a company’s merchandising team, rather than make it easier for engineers to service a ticket to build a /products/hat/:id endpoint every 6 weeks.

Non-linear Drag is a term I use to describe factors that lead to exponentially decaying productivity over time. Most folks would probably lump this in with “tech debt”, a term I doubt ever really had a lucid definition. I think precision matters when you’re offering people a razor, so I want to differentiate this form of tech debt, which generally involves bad architecture or fundamental technology mismatches, versus things like an increasing support surface8

Linear impacts and drags exist, and they’re generally the majority of what we encounter Non-linear impacts and drags exist, and the opportunity to create them is definitionally rare Engineers receive outsized rewards for the non-linear impacts they create9

Only debate the non-linear. If there is a strong case to be made that a proposal will create some non-linear impact, then it is worth debating at some length.

Beware carnies dressed as storm troopers. The circus empire is always coming to town. Keep a safe distance, a skeptical mind, and one hand on your wallet.