How do you deal with, avoid, or accept complexity — differently than you might have earlier in your career?
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How do you deal with, avoid, or accept complexity — differently than you might have earlier in your career?
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
Nandini S Hinduja -
Jean-Michel 🕵🏻♂️ Fayard -
Nandini S Hinduja -
Mangai Ram -
Latest comments (31)
As long as the unit tests are readable, I give up caring about the code readability
Complexity is reserved for business logic. Complication is acceptable for technical concerns.
When I was younger, I tended to avoid complexity, or always tried to go on it with some support (either colleague or internet).
But now with some more experience, I'll always deal it the same way with ~3steps :
I recommand having a look at "refactoring guru", the website with the badger mascot, as it explains a lot of it, with detailed examples both theoric and with code.
Some more advices :
Maybe the best advice I can give is that it will never be flawless the first time, and don't try to make 10+ classes for a start.
Most of the time I do a big old "index.php" or "script.js", code on the fly, and when things are finally starting running flawlessly, and your file is 500+ lines : it's a hint that it is time to split your code into multiple folders/files.
Got client stuff ? Create a "Client" classe.
Need to create a new client ? Create "Client->create( )" method
Client needs name and email ? Update your class : name & email properties. "Client->create(name, email)"
And so on.
Once you feel good and confortable about this, to get to the next level go check Unit Testing, and after that TDD > Test Driven Development.
It will help you thinking about your code as input/outputs and stuff, and can really improve code reliability, maintenance, avoid regression, and also make your code really faster.
Sorry for the big block and the approximate english.
Feel free to ask questions if you have some ;)
Have a nice day
I've learned to manage it. I do so by using abstractions and "Bounded Contexts" that closely represent the business domain. If a certain abstraction is too complex to maintain, "grok" or reason about, I "encapsulate it" and defer all its complexity to a consumable contract. This often applies to classes, modules, libraries as well as feature teams! I wish I'd had learned this "domain-focused" approach much earlier in my career. It would have made me more effective at maintaining codebases and designing larger systems.
I have personally become more complex as I age, my code less so.
Turning to have Code as documentation has allowed me to not only simplify it, but make methods and steps easier to understand with good naming.
I see complexity arise when people try to fit square pegs in round holes, use tools for purposes they were not intended for and for which they are mismatched. I think complexity can be reduced by 'going with the grain' of tools we use rather than against. Have written more thoughts here: dev.to/yawaramin/reducing-system-c...
Complexity is always accidental.
We need to avoid it all the time.
Forget about code complexity and software complexity. they are a myth
It's...
Complicated.
I've always strived for simplicity, as it is beautiful to look at and to work with. And it works.
I find that inexperienced developers often overcomplicate simple things. I've made peace with that as everyone needs to learn sometime. It is frustrating though to look at a project, codebase or architecture that is 10x times more bloated and convoluted than it should be.
Will never forget this from one of the authors here at dev:
(begin rant)
With web development, it's easy to spend so much time searching for the perfect tool that promises to relieve whatever complexity you might encounter with your project. However, that complexity has to exist somewhere, and any new tool you decide to pick up has the complement of additional mental overhead in learning that tool and relearning that tool when you return to it after a while, which isn't uncommon in large projects.
From being a CS major this past year, I've had to readjust my thinking to accommodate different language types. I had a class in assembly this past semester and it really showed the importance of knowing the extent of a system, but how to manage complexity efficiently in any environment, even at such low levels of the software stack.
The problem with modern Web Development and complexity (at this point I feel like I should make this an entire post lol) is that you have to deal with 3-4 different languages in harmony and modern web development encourages strong interop between them (e.g. css-in-js, TailwindCSS) while also preaching "separation of concerns". This leads to confused and convoluted environments, great disparity between codebases that are difficult to maintain and engineers are terrified to run
npm update, and tools that you find that you have to ask yourself why it even exists since it covers such a specific edge case.Every modern web development tool is trying to solve the same problem and no one is satisfied with settling on a solution to manage complexity. That's why we're now seeing so much of "just use vanilla HTML/JS/CSS, it works great", but then you ignore the reason that ReactJS/Vue/Angular were invented in the first place: to consolidate complexity. Web development is a delicate balancing act that requires sacrifice in actually solving some of your complexity instead of expecting a tool or library to.
Learning and work experience has helped a lot to cope with complexity in various different ways. I'd say though sometimes It's unavoidable but as a rule of thumb If it can be made simple, then simple it is. My latest recipe is something like:
On top of all of this with time I learned that no matter how complex it seems at first It always ends up being doable, managing that initial anxiety is very useful.
Code is simple, people are what's complicated.
Get the reason and workflow from the person takes the time and effort. Then the code is simple to implement.
Actually it hasn't changed much it just reenforced the theory I had already because of my SystemsThinking background (I've been coached by a close friend of Deming the guy who helped Japan Industry become number I after WWII) youtube.com/watch?v=OqEeIG8aPPk ie Complexity is kind of fractal concept you could unify. In Science it is even quantifiable as degree of freedom which I refer below as "intrinseque complexity".
I've been always attracted to complex Systems originally I almost embrace a career of Astrophysicist but I had to go to Canada too cold for me :) Then I was half professional in Stockmarket (being analyst for pro traders in a big bank) in parallel to Software Enginer - which is kind of amazement because I had created a unique model that is based on a non linear equation which is extremely rare as the huge majority of models are stochastics so I'm one of the rare person who knows some truth about how it really works. And of course also Software which is rather simple compared to the other twos because the intrinseque complexity are augmented by artificial over complications which are partly social organisation, partly technical, partly accidental, partly commercial so it's kind of folkore, people who pretend to be "software architect" for example are almost laughed at compared to architect in traditional sense, Alan Kay himself think the field lacks rigor, but that's I find actually even more attractive as it creates opportunity to improve the field more than in another field. In the future this won't be possible anymore because probably it will be completely industrialised and commoditized by the Cloud Giants.
I've become incredibly paranoid about potential complexity.
Earlier I thought it was bad design/coding/development practices.
Now I've realized most complexity can be solved by determine what the problem actually is, rather than dealing with complexity in the solution. IE most problems aren't actually complex. Identifying them correctly can remove large vast quantities of complexity in any solution you create.
There are some issues that are just plain complex, but most aren't.
Seems you discovered the difference between doing the things right and doing the right things youtube.com/watch?v=OqEeIG8aPPk ;)
@lepinekong
Thank you for the gold nugget of a video ;)