Peter is the former President of the New Zealand Open Source Society. He is currently working on Business Workflow Automation, and is the core maintainer for Gravity Workflow a GPL workflow engine.
Microservices, with my last breath I spit at thee.
The basic architectural principle behind them is similar to Unix apps, where you have small applications each with a narrow scope. You use plumbing to pull them together into complete systems. The idea is to break things into independent subsystems that are weakly coupled. In theory.
In theory if you observe the idea of having a narrow and specific scope while decoupling from the domain they have application. Certainly the play a big part in distributed systems.
Where they come undone is when they are tied tightly to the domain, sharing the data model. If this happens they either end up sharing the persistence mechanism, aka the database, and thus having a central point of failure, or having integration and query nightmares when you try to pull data together from multiple Microservices into a single coherent view.
As with many other areas they are adopted and implemented as some kind of silver bullet, but without a skeptical analytical approach to their implementation can turn into the classic Big Ball of Mud, where Microservice is piled on top of Microservice with little or no concern about clear architectural separation of concerns.
In my experience they become tightly coupled to narrow use cases and lead to an unmanageable explosion of code and nightmare of latency. Perhaps some companies have the engineering discipline to implement them right, but too often this isn't the case.
I may add that use of microservices makes deployment and maintenance much more complicated than it needs to be. And makes local deployment for testing/debugging at least very inconvenient (usually just impractical, often even impossible).
Possibly I know better solution than microservices, I've described it in my blog here, at dev.to recently.
Peter is the former President of the New Zealand Open Source Society. He is currently working on Business Workflow Automation, and is the core maintainer for Gravity Workflow a GPL workflow engine.
I read your article. Looks good, if only because I have adopted something very similar. With Gravity there is dynamic runtime configuration which can create new data structures and related API. Business rules, views, filters and integrations are all defined at runtime through the API. It is a clustered system so that all the services run on each node, so regardless of the API called it is capable of servicing it without doing another hop. It uses JMS queues to manage workload across the cluster. Because each node of the cluster is identical you will never get resource bound on a specific service because any node can do anything. There are three clusters involved, the API, JMS and Persistence.
Yeah, I found myself on that bandwagon for a short time when Meteor came out. Very fun to work with, and the SPA idea is very attractive. But it adds a lot of complexity and some other issues that normally don't happen on server-rendered websites, and there are little pieces of different projects that can be made interactive without going full-blown SPA.
I've been a professional C, Perl, PHP and Python developer.
I'm an ex-sysadmin from the late 20th century.
These days I do more Javascript and CSS and whatnot, and promote UX and accessibility.
WSL: yeah, I'd rather just use either Windows or Linux (and I do: Windows on company-owned laptop, Linux on my personal laptop).
OOCSS? I don't even wanna know...
Is WordPress overrated among devs, or do you mean vs. other blogging platforms or website builders? It's fairly easy to set up quickly, which seems to be why it has so much all-around support. But its DB storage is definitely bloated, and most themes I've used are loaded with gimmicks rather than being focused on performance.
So no, I don't care for it. Was just wondering what you meant.
Dark mode is a personal preference for me, but yeah, each person and work environment is different. "To each his own."
I've been a professional C, Perl, PHP and Python developer.
I'm an ex-sysadmin from the late 20th century.
These days I do more Javascript and CSS and whatnot, and promote UX and accessibility.
Wordpress is ubiquitous but it's not very well made. It takes a lot of ideas from old-style PHP and just runs with them. People like Gutenberg but it just encourages storing chunks of non-semantic, non-transformable HTML in the database. People bolt things on and call it a CMS, but it's really not designed to be one.
I've been a professional C, Perl, PHP and Python developer.
I'm an ex-sysadmin from the late 20th century.
These days I do more Javascript and CSS and whatnot, and promote UX and accessibility.
I am a software development engineer in test for Infosys. My job is officially to write automated tests in Selenium Webdriver. I'm also a web developer as a hobbyest
I’m a medical grad turned self taught software engineer . I work with python and the javascript ecosystem . I’m also web application security researcher finding bug on hackerone.
Over 35 years here. I use IDEs for the heavy lifting (RubyMine nowadays), but simple/quick edits are more easily done with vi(m). Muscle memory is a thing not to be discounted.
Are you saying that is overrated? just because it appropiated common sense, made it rigid, replaced common words with "cool" terms and made a ecosystem of courses, certifications, levels, etc. Now, you could have the experience and good common sense, but are you a crapbelt 90dan?, do you know all the fabricated "technical" jargon? have you paid the courses and certificates?.
Don't do useless things, don't waste time. SCRUM invented that!
EU 🇪🇺 | Art, Tech & Good Vibrations 🤳 | Founder of ᴛᴏᴍᴏʀʀᴏᴡ 🌞 hellotomorrow.agency • Just started working on a new endeavour 👉 usepoe.app • Follow me on Twitter!
Location
Brussels, Belgium
Work
UX Engineer, Product Manager, sometimes Designer at Self
Top comments (127)
React
Micro-services
Apple products
Microservices, with my last breath I spit at thee.
The basic architectural principle behind them is similar to Unix apps, where you have small applications each with a narrow scope. You use plumbing to pull them together into complete systems. The idea is to break things into independent subsystems that are weakly coupled. In theory.
In theory if you observe the idea of having a narrow and specific scope while decoupling from the domain they have application. Certainly the play a big part in distributed systems.
Where they come undone is when they are tied tightly to the domain, sharing the data model. If this happens they either end up sharing the persistence mechanism, aka the database, and thus having a central point of failure, or having integration and query nightmares when you try to pull data together from multiple Microservices into a single coherent view.
As with many other areas they are adopted and implemented as some kind of silver bullet, but without a skeptical analytical approach to their implementation can turn into the classic Big Ball of Mud, where Microservice is piled on top of Microservice with little or no concern about clear architectural separation of concerns.
In my experience they become tightly coupled to narrow use cases and lead to an unmanageable explosion of code and nightmare of latency. Perhaps some companies have the engineering discipline to implement them right, but too often this isn't the case.
I may add that use of microservices makes deployment and maintenance much more complicated than it needs to be. And makes local deployment for testing/debugging at least very inconvenient (usually just impractical, often even impossible).
Possibly I know better solution than microservices, I've described it in my blog here, at dev.to recently.
I read your article. Looks good, if only because I have adopted something very similar. With Gravity there is dynamic runtime configuration which can create new data structures and related API. Business rules, views, filters and integrations are all defined at runtime through the API. It is a clustered system so that all the services run on each node, so regardless of the API called it is capable of servicing it without doing another hop. It uses JMS queues to manage workload across the cluster. Because each node of the cluster is identical you will never get resource bound on a specific service because any node can do anything. There are three clusters involved, the API, JMS and Persistence.
Curious why React? Are you saying Vue or Angular are better? FWIW I don't use React myself.
What's underrated is using none of them.
This.
It's easy for a beginner to assume that every company out there is using a front-end framework.
I'm still seeing lots of both greenfield and brownfield projects using vanilla JavaScript with a .NET, Java or PHP backend.
Building everything as a SPA
100% this!
Yeah, I found myself on that bandwagon for a short time when Meteor came out. Very fun to work with, and the SPA idea is very attractive. But it adds a lot of complexity and some other issues that normally don't happen on server-rendered websites, and there are little pieces of different projects that can be made interactive without going full-blown SPA.
That gotta be the iPhone.
MacOS, WSL, npm, react, BEM, OOCSS, Wordpress, Vanity points, Sublime Text, OhMyZsh, NerdTree, Flat Whites, Imposter Syndrome, seafood, any product variant that starts with the word "Gaming", "modern" PHP frameworks, one-liners, aliases, influencers, "devrel", 10x developers, BMWs, italicised code comments, dark mode, the United States, conference swag, people who humblebrag, millisecond optimisations.
draws breath
WSL: yeah, I'd rather just use either Windows or Linux (and I do: Windows on company-owned laptop, Linux on my personal laptop).
OOCSS? I don't even wanna know...
Is WordPress overrated among devs, or do you mean vs. other blogging platforms or website builders? It's fairly easy to set up quickly, which seems to be why it has so much all-around support. But its DB storage is definitely bloated, and most themes I've used are loaded with gimmicks rather than being focused on performance.
So no, I don't care for it. Was just wondering what you meant.
Dark mode is a personal preference for me, but yeah, each person and work environment is different. "To each his own."
Wordpress is ubiquitous but it's not very well made. It takes a lot of ideas from old-style PHP and just runs with them. People like Gutenberg but it just encourages storing chunks of non-semantic, non-transformable HTML in the database. People bolt things on and call it a CMS, but it's really not designed to be one.
I was with you till you said seafood... 🤨
:P
Very true. "draws breath" ha.. ha.. :)
Vim.
How do you know if a developer uses Vim? Don't worry, he'll tell you.
IMHO, vim is worth the hype. And long time vimmers are fairly rare
Found the dev that uses Vim.
It’s not
Thats just like, your opinion.
Over 35 years here. I use IDEs for the heavy lifting (RubyMine nowadays), but simple/quick edits are more easily done with vi(m). Muscle memory is a thing not to be discounted.
react. I just need a button, not a button factory.
Yeah... but what if?
apply for VC funding...
Utilization, i.e. how busy people are. And working early/late as a status symbol.
Elon joined the chat
*reads your message
Elon left the chat
Scrum
Are you saying that is overrated? just because it appropiated common sense, made it rigid, replaced common words with "cool" terms and made a ecosystem of courses, certifications, levels, etc. Now, you could have the experience and good common sense, but are you a crapbelt 90dan?, do you know all the fabricated "technical" jargon? have you paid the courses and certificates?.
Don't do useless things, don't waste time. SCRUM invented that!
❤️
Javascript 🙄
The chain of blocks
Some comments may only be visible to logged-in visitors. Sign in to view all comments.