Hi everybody! After a long day of coding and googling and gpting and googling again it’s time to have some fun (hopefully) with this unlikely pairing between software and traditional architecture styles. Disclaimer: JUST FOR FUN PURPOSES. Enjoy!
a. The Baroque
A baroque codebase is the easiest to recognize: powerfully intricated, making complexity a distinctive mark. Nested ternaries exceeding the 300 chars monopolizing the viewer RAM capacity like the ornaments in cathedrals; multiple if else creating twisted logical mazes as the garden labyrinths in Versailles.
Everything is basically screaming “KISS? My SCSS”. “DRY is ok only for summers”, but nothing new: the Baroque exists as a celebration of Monarch power exactly as the baroque codebase celebrates its creator: a.k.a. the only programmer that can actually understand what’s written in it.
And scaling the team? Let them eat brioches. Or cookies, maybe.
b. The Bauhaus
Now, at the opposite side of the fence, the Bauhaus codebase thrives on purpose-driven design.
Modularity is the key, and pure code craftmanship serves high order architectural aims, as reusability, modularity, and production-at-scale. Code ready to be shipped in libs, and reused across a whole enterprise architecture. Css? Flex.
c. Art Deco
Elegance, glamour, symmetry; the art deco codebase thrives on a well designed aestetic both for the programmer and the end user: modular but rich CSS, articulated componentization strategy, a complete Storybook and readme with real markup, and just a little room for sparkling tweaks, as template literals and right-placed one liners.
Come on, only those endowed with a intrinsic-yet-functional sense of beauty could write a readme with real markdown.
d. The Gothic
While the baroque codebase is gratuitously paying homage to complexity per se [or to its creator], the Goth codebase is complex but for a whole another bunch of reasons.
Deep inheritance trees, reflection, or an obscure business logic which somewhere, somewhat, is extending down to the COBOL core keeping that vertical spiraling of the reference architectural style, but more in a ‘Journey to the Center of the Earth’ fashion. Usually the programmers on a Gothic codebase are keepers, also of borderline EOL dependencies. Love you all, the world is on yur shoulder.
COBOL this way up. Credits: Markus Gombocz
e. The Futurist
AAAAAH, the futurist codebase.
Think about any groundbreaking change in any framework: the futurist codebase has it. Full stop. Usually futurist devs update to the latest, and “not stable” should be just changed into “experimental” in the common vocabulary. Rollback is always an option, while disruption is NOT. In any form.
f. The Minimalist
And aaaaat laaaaast, minimal codebases. Eligible as supreme, inspiring model, a minimalist codebase should be recognizable for its brilliant simplicity, cleanliness, modularity and straightforward readability.
Point is, it simply doesn’t exist.
XOXO.
Mary
Top comments (0)