NO SILVER BULLET

In this episode, we discuss how to learn effectively as a software engineer. Why some people seem to learn faster than others? What are some practical ways to speed up your learning? Instead of promising magical shortcuts to becoming a principal engineer in months, we focus on a more balanced approach that helps you build skills by mixing theory with practice.

Quick takeaways

• Focus on applying what you learn - reading books or watching videos isn’t enough without practice
• Build real projects that challenge you - trivial examples don’t expose you to the hidden complexities you’ll face in actual work
• Expect and embrace frustration - feeling stuck often means you’re learning something valuable
• Learn timeless concepts over framework-specific details - aim for universal software skills like modularization
• Mix theory with practice in small chunks - read a bit and code a bit, rather than consuming large amounts of content at once

Notes

• We mentioned our learning platform
• Domain-Driven Design was referenced throughout - check “Implementing Domain-Driven Design” by Vaughn Vernon
• Watermill - our open-source library mentioned as an example of a project that taught us while helping others: github.com/ThreeDotsLabs/watermill
• Event-Driven Architecture traces back to 1950s, but was formalized about 20 years ago
• The Repository pattern blog post
  

Full episode notes and transcript: http://threedots.tech/episode/learning-software-skills-fast/

In this episode of the No Silver Bullet podcast, we discuss Clean Architecture and whether it's overengineering or a best practice for organizing code.We talk about why the pattern is often controversial, when it makes sense to use it, and how to implement it effectively.We share our experiences using Clean Architecture across different projects and teams, including the common concerns developers have when first seeing it.

Quick takeaways:

• Clean Architecture is most beneficial for complex projects with larger teams - for small teams or simple projects, it can become overengineering.
• Separation of concerns is the core benefit - keeping domain logic separate from implementation details makes code more maintainable.
• It's easy to go too far - using too many interfaces or too many layers without a clear reason creates unnecessary complexity.
• Start simple and evolve your architecture - don't force Clean Architecture from the start if your project doesn't need it yet.
• Understanding the "why" behind the pattern is crucial - blindly following it without understanding leads to poor implementations.

Notes:

• Related patterns:
• The Dependency Inversion Principle: one of SOLID principles.
• Blog post: Introducing Clean Architecture: https://threedots.tech/post/introducing-clean-architecture/
• Blog post: Microservices test architecture: https://threedots.tech/post/microservices-test-architecture/
• Blog post: Repository Pattern in Go: https://threedots.tech/post/repository-pattern-in-go/
• Blog post: Combining DDD, CQRS, and Clean Architecture in Go: https://threedots.tech/post/ddd-cqrs-clean-architecture-combined/ (Mentioned as available)
• Example Go Project: Wild Workouts: https://github.com/ThreeDotsLabs/wild-workouts-go-ddd-example
• go-cleanarch Linter: https://github.com/roblaszczak/go-cleanarch

Full episode notes: https://threedots.tech/episode/is-clean-architecture-overengineering/

Quick takeaways

• Frameworks promise productivity but often lead to issues as projects get larger and more complex.
• The Go community prefers small, focused libraries over frameworks due to Go's design philosophy influenced by Unix principles.
• Watch out for risks using frameworks like vendor lock-in, deprecation, and costly migrations that can take months.
• Explicit code is more maintainable than magic framework abstractions.
• Choose your approach based on project size and maturity - frameworks might work for prototypes, while modular libraries are better for long-term projects.

Introduction

In this episode of the No Silver Bullet podcast, we discuss frameworks in Go and when they're useful or problematic.We talk about why the Go community generally avoids frameworks compared to other languages, and how small, modular libraries are often preferred in Go development.

We share our experiences with frameworks across different projects, including tradeoffs between productivity and long-term maintenance.

Notes

• Model-View-Controller (MVC): Pattern first described in the 1970s for Smalltalk, still widely used today.
• Unix Philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy: design concept created by Ken Thompson (also a Go creator) promoting small programs that do one thing well and work together.
• When to avoid DRY in Go: https://threedots.tech/post/things-to-know-about-dry/
• Watermill: https://watermill.io: Our event-driven library for Go designed to not be a framework.
• Repository Pattern: https://threedots.tech/post/repository-pattern-in-go/: Our blog post that is still relevant and frequently referenced.
• tdl: https://github.com/ThreeDotsLabs/cli and pq: https://github.com/ThreeDotsLabs/watermill/tree/master/tools/pq - the CLI tools we mentioned.
• Clean Architecture: https://threedots.tech/post/introducing-clean-architecture/: The topic of our next podcast episode, a design approach that helps maintain separation of concerns.
• Wild Workouts: https://github.com/ThreeDotsLabs/wild-workouts-go-ddd-example : Our example Go codebase demonstrating clean architecture.  
• The Best Go framework: no framework?: https://threedots.tech/post/best-go-framework/
• 
  

Quotes

The happy path is easy enough, but the happy path is usually not the hard part of software. We often overvalue how much effort the boilerplate requires. - Miłosz

Framework knowledge tends to become out of date. You can spend days or weeks learning something about a framework, but it can be outdated. And if you switch to another programming language or company, a lot of effort that you spent to learn stuff will be just wasted. - Robert

It's more important to learn even-driven architecture because you learn the theory behind it and how it works in general - it transfers better to whatever you will do later. Focus on timeless skills like how to split modules in your application, how to make it decoupled, how to write business logic so it's easy to read and modify. - Miłosz

The Go language is heavily influenced by Unix philosophy - write programs that do one thing and do it well, write programs that work together. It's visible in Go's standard library. This is why Go promotes building independent components that you can connect together. - Robert

You need to be careful not to go too far with foundations. It's better to start with some modular libraries, have some reasonable setup in place, but don't go too crazy with it. Most of the time you'll need to refactor the project anyway, whatever you do, because it can change drastically. - Miłosz

One big decision at the beginning may cost you six months of work later. Understanding if something is tightly coupled to your application is simple - just think about how easy it would be to remove it. - Robert

Full episode notes: https://threedots.tech/episode/when-you-should-not-use-frameworks/

Quick Takeaways

• High-quality code is mainly about keeping good iteration speed over time - can you add features without breaking what works?
• Not all code needs to be high quality - focus your efforts on the code that's most important, changes often, or creates the most value.
• The right time to refactor is after you know your product has value, but before technical debt gets too big - make small improvements bit by bit.
• Architecture decisions need more thought than other code quality factors since they're hardest to change later - ask "how hard would this be to remove?"
• Balance between MVP and quality depends on your situation - for experiments, cut corners on purpose; for critical systems or enterprise products, focus on quality from the start.

Introduction

In the first episode of No Silver Bullet live podcast, we talk about the balance between writing high-quality code and taking shortcuts.

Based on nearly 20 years of working together on various projects, we discuss when it makes sense to move fast rather than aim for perfect code, and how to avoid technical debt that can kill your project.

We focus on making mindful engineering decisions instead of blindly following rules like "always do X" or "never do Y".Different situations need different approaches to code quality.

Notes

• "No Silver Bullet": The classic 1986 paper by Fred Brooks that our podcast name references, discussing how there's no single development that will solve all software engineering challenges.
• Our Learning Platform: /learn: The project we discussed that started as an MVP and was later refactored
• Architecture Patterns:
• Pareto Principle: The 80/20 rule we mentioned - often 20% of the code creates 80% of the value
• Future Episodes:
• Development Practices:

Quotes

Quality is not about some kind of elegance of code because it's just an artificial thing. It's not really helpful for your team if it's pretty. - Miłosz

Often you have in the code places that you don't touch often or it's not earning a lot of money... Ask what are the places that we're changing the most often? What are the places that are creating most of the value? - Robert

I remember one project when we started applying Domain-Driven Design... Everyone loved it in the team... But what I also remember is that it had no paying users and we had to shut it down. - Miłosz

If you did your dirty POC, don't miss the time when you should clean it up, because it's easy to go into a spot where it's no longer possible to do that. - Robert

After working with [legacy systems] for long enough, you might think, 'I've had enough of this, I won't allow my next project to rot like this one.' It sounds like a good idea, but it can also be a trap. - Miłosz

Sometimes it can be even the opposite. Having everything super consistent can actually be worse than having inconsistent things, because keeping this consistency requires effort... Sometimes it requires you to use an approach that is not optimal just because 'we're doing it consistently.' - Robert

A useful mental model here is to care about the useful product first, not the technical design, which of course is important, but I think it's easy to overvalue it. - Miłosz

Try to find some places where you can do refactoring in one week... Often you don't need to rewrite an entire service. You can just do some refactoring in the code and iterate on that. - Robert

Episode notes and summary: https://threedots.tech/episode/when-to-write-low-quality-code/