Top 3: what's wrong with DRY, lessons from Stripe and how Uber broke laws

Hello my friends.

Here's what I picked this week, enjoy!

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​1. Why DRY is the most over-rated programming principle​

TL;DR: How people abuse the DRY concept and then don't understand why the code base is so complex.

DRY is the most misunderstood concept in the world. If you use it as a statement (don’t repeat yourself) and put repetitive lines of code in a separate file, in a couple of months the complexity of the project will be so big that:

1. onboarding new people will take weeks
2. product release dates will be delayed
3. writing into such a project will be no fun and you will see how people leave
4. someone at the meeting will say “damn, we need to refactor our codebase someday”

A lot of people think that an application is just lines of code. When in fact an application is a system.

If you think in terms of lines, then taking out repetitive code is really a good thing. But if you think in terms of a system, taking repetitive code out often create a bad abstraction. And then the fun begins.

A bad abstraction = Increased modules coupling

Increased modules coupling = Increased the complexity of the code base

Increased the complexity of the codebase = Long development times, long product release times, and low team productivity

“Okay, what to do?”

Simple way: read “Duplication is far cheaper than the wrong abstraction,” not create abstractions, and duplicate code until you are confident that the abstraction you are creating is handsome and effective.

Hard way: understand cohesion and coupling dynamic, read about the balance of DRY and WET, take the best of SOLID and GRASP, design a couple of horrible projects. And then realize that each of these concepts was invented by different people at different times for different problems, that there is no truth to them, that they are all just abstractions that try to describe the same thing from different angles, but they will never describe it because they only think in terms of programming. At this point, slow down, look around, breathe, make coffee, realize that no area in the world can exist in isolation from others and to better understand one area you have to study others, and finally, read about systems.

Favorite part from the article:

“We are talking about all kinds of fancy programming stuff to try to solve problems that only exist because we don't want to repeat the same 6 line snippet in a handful of different places because DRY tells us that's bad. What's happening, is our adherence to DRY is leading us down a garden path to building an unnecessarily complex application that could be written very simply.”

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2. Operating Well: What I Learned at Stripe​

TL;DR: Former Product Manager at Stripe shares lessons on how to be productive and build products effectively.

• At a high level, there seem to be two ways to operate large systems. (1) Micro-manage everything (meh) (2) Build trust systems 🔥
• Changing strategy feels like progress but it usually isn’t.
• Often, changing your frame will let you find a solution that solves a much larger problem or eliminates the problem altogether.
• Create psychological safety in a team to make it effective.

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3. Uber broke laws, duped police and secretly lobbied governments, leak reveals​

TL;DR: How Travis Kalanick (founder of Uber) worked his way to success.

If you haven't seen "Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber" you're missing out a lot of fun.
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And at the end, here what happens when you elevate one of the popular dilemmas to the absolutes of absurdity – neal.fun​

That's all for this week, take care and have a great one!

– Nick