I thought I’d pen a short blog post on a question I frequently find myself asking.
You’re right, but are you relevant?
Me
As software developers, it’s all too easy to want to select the new hot technologies available to us. Building a simple web app is great, but building a distributed web-app based on an auto-scaling cluster making use of CQRS and an SPA front-end written in the latest JavaScript hotness is just more interesting. Software development is often about finding simple solutions to complex problems, allowing us to minimize complexity.
- You’re right, distributed microservices will allow you to deploy separate parts of your app independently, but is that relevant to a back-office system which only needs to be available 9-5?
- You’re right, CQRS will allow you to better scale the database to handle a tremendous number of queries in parallel, but is that relevant when we only expect 100 users a day?
- You’re right, that new Javascript SPA framework will let you create really compelling, interactive applications, but is that relevant to a basic CRUD app?
Lots of modern technology can do amazing things and there are always compelling reasons to choose technology x, but are those reasons relevant to the problem at hand? If you spend a lot of time up front designing systems with tough-to-implement technologies and approaches which aren’t needed; a lot of development effort would have been needlessly spent adding all kinds of complexity which wasn’t needed. Worse, we could have added lots of complexity that then resists change, preventing us from adapting the system in the direction our users require.
At 67 Bricks, we encourage teams to start with something simple and then iterate upon it, adding complexity only when it is justified. Software systems can be designed to embrace change. An idea that’s the subject of one of my favourite books Building Evolutionary Architectures.
So next time you find yourself architecting a big complex system with lots of cutting edge technologies that allow for all kinds of “-ilities” to be achieved. Be sure to stop and ask yourself. “I’m right, but am I relevant?”
