10 Blog Posts about
Software Tooling Complexity
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  • Incredibly cool demo - code examples are so simple that you can understand without knowing anything about riffle.
  • user interfaces are expressed as queries, those queries are executed by a fast, performant incremental maintenance system, and that incremental maintenance gives us detailed data provenance throughout the system
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  • "there are a few narrow examples of where SPAs make sense and are the right choice".
  • "SPAs as an industry trend or “best practice” were mistake" - I agree.
  • The list of things SPAs require that are done by the browser already:
    • Determine if the link points to the current site or an external location.
    • If it’s the current site, match the URL path to content.
    • If the content is API-driven, get it via a fetch() request.
    • Update the URL path and browser history, without triggering a page reload.
    • Render the content onto the page.
    • If there’s an anchor link in the URL, scroll to the anchored element.
    • Shift focus to either the top of the document, or the anchored element (most SPAs get this wrong).
    • Announce the page load/content change to screen reader users (many SPAs also get this wrong).
    • If any scripts you’re running rely on a specific DOM structure, or are attached to specific elements, reinitialize them.
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  • So Many great quotes in this.
  • "How is it that we’ve found ways to organize the work around so many other creative disciplines but writing software is still hard"
  • "Agile software development doesn’t have an explicit metaphor, apart from it being a bunch of people essentially "
  • "The film business, both a high degree of creativity but also a lot of specialization. They also had a couple more decades to figure it all out." <- They also baked top-down-ness, "creative genius" and coerce over convince into their cullture. Software culture is 10x more democratic.
  • "As soon as you start to involve more than one person, you can either try to have them all work on the same mental representation (like in pair programming), or you need to introduce some restrictions on the area of responsibility, so that everyone can mind their own business, or at least work more independently."
  • "whenever you need to design a system against many constraints, things get exponentially easier if you take problems one piece at a time" <- I need to read more Christopher Alexander.
  • "The problem is that by breaking down problems into parts, you severely restrict the solution space. If you do it wrong, the right solution depends on two different part doing something that may not make sense if looked at in an isolated fashion."
  • "Agile software development proposed: write the simplest thing that will work, and then refactor (that means cleanup) you code base constantly."
  • "What if software were built in the same way we built cities? What if the core parts of our business would be like streets, and all that newfangled stuff is something we could build on top, experiment, tear it down if it does not work"
  • "Some of these pieces of infrastructure change very slowly (like roads), while others are much more flexible, like the way apartments or shops are used." <- Love this. One thing that prevents us from doing this software is the arbitrary way in which we can expose "parts" of codebases. Git/github makes it next to impossible to say "x person/team owns this and can modify it", unless "this" is one single folder within which files are stored.
  • "if we built our cities the way we build our software, you would need to enter the shop through the special garage, and exit through the roof to walk a wire to get to another custom made building from scrapped containers to do the checkout"
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  • If we consider that we need a re-bundling in order to see the promise of real productivity building crudware, this seems kind of big.
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  • A good one from the archives. Key points
    • Developers are now a big enough market to sell to (crazy that this was only 8 years ago considering how big that market is now).
    • Trends identified
    • Democratization of software development: I wonder would she think that this has progressed as fast as she predicted.
    • "Developer Components" - basically APIification
    • "Picks & Shovels" - Atlassian revenues were $100m then, now $1.6b
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