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Discussion on: Abstraction For The Sake Of Abstraction

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Bill Miller

Always beware of the "rabbit hole". I can't count the number of times I've overengineered something, and ~50% of the time it's never used (Luck/Skill? who knows :)). It's even more embarassing when you are showing a new team member through the codebase and have to explain why it's overengineered and realize during the explanation that the case you were allowing for can never ever happen ... and never could.

My personal "ah-ha" moment was during one of these cases with a contractor and I had to honestly tell them "the entire premise that this code is written upon is complete crap". We had a good laugh and then we re-coded it in 1 day removing 80% of the old code.