Changelog Interviews - Build software that lasts!
Source: youtu.be
A really enjoyable interview pod from The Changelog, where Jerod and Adam chatted with Bert Hubert about building software that lasts. This is super important in todays age of "npm installing away our problems". Bert covers the expected stuff, like keeping projects simple and reducing complication in code. But he also mentions other things, like walking a mile in the shoes of your support team so you can feel the pain of the things you might put out into the world.
... we all know that we should not write software that is as complicated as we can make it because that's not going to end well. But everyone said, look, we had very bad experience. Like we need to figure out seven years ago why this clever code, what it actually does and then often you find that this clever code there was no need to make it clever. ... even if you have 25 [political parties], there is no need to set up a complicated data structure to hold 25 political affiliation names. But one day you might sit there and say, hey, wouldn't it be useful? Wouldn't it be fun if we had a complicated red-black tree so that we could make really rapid searches of our 25 political parties. And, and then you sit there and maybe in 2032 trying to debug why it doesn't work. And, and that's because you try to be clever.
Bert Hubert