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Discussion on: The cost of abstraction

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danielgomezrico profile image
Daniel Gomez

Nice words, one thing that may scary me a little bit is that this kind of tips may help people to never implementing some kind of architecture or abstractions or things just because we need to "move faster", like the other side of the coin, not having abstractions is also a problem, WDYT?

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Marko Kruljac

Hi Daniel, my intention was not to say that you should avoid abstraction. It is that you should be aware of its cost and to know where, when and how much to apply it. Often times articles touch only on the positive side of things, which can trick entry level engineers into thinking that a particular pattern, technology or architecture is without cost and should be applied everywhere and always.

One example would be the JWT token, which could often times be replaced with a basic bearer token, depending on your use case.

Giovanni gave a good heuristic, go with the Pareto's principle, and never forget that your job as an engineer is to provide value to the business. To do so, it helps to reduce cost of development to a reasonable minimum, but of course no lower than that.