Your Architecture Sucks and I Don't Care

http://friendlydingo.com/blog/2011/your-architecture-sucks-and-i-dont-care

by rco8786 • 16 years ago

59 37 16 years ago

wccrawford• 16 years ago

Yes, the end user benefits from refactoring code. Good code is easier to maintain and has fewer bugs. That means faster updates and fewer failures. I can't imagine a user that doesn't want that.

jbri• 16 years ago

It seems that, once again, the best position is somewhere in the middle, rather than on either extreme.

kls• 16 years ago

Right good architecture is transparent things seem intuitive but yet not cumbersome. A good deal of standards and conventions can eliminate a fair amount of "architectural" code. When I see managers and factories everywhere is a project I know that it has the signature mark of being "architected" and usually find a good deal of gold-plating that need not be in the project.

CodeMage• 16 years ago

Same old warning against becoming an "architecture astronaut". Look, I understand you got burned and you want to share. However, I'm getting a teeny little bit tired of people who -- out of good intentions -- make it sound like architecture (and clean code and whatnot) isn't important at all.

There's a reason you should pay attention to the state of your codebase. Or rather, there should be a reason for it, one that is better than the intellectual equivalent of wanking. If you're trying to make your code "beautiful" just because you've heard that it's good to keep it "clean" and to "follow every coding standard you've ever heard of", then you're wasting your time.

However, if you're refactoring your code because you found yourself doing the same thing for the 10th time (with small differences), then it's time well spent. If you're spending a bit of effort to structure your code in a way that will help you avoid shooting yourself in the foot (because you've been there and done that and it's no fun at all), then it's effort well spent. And guess what? That's what architecture is all about.

Your users don’t care about architecture, they only care if your app works.

Architecture is what keeps your app working over time.

viraptor• 16 years ago

Came here to write something like that, but you said it better than I could. Soon, I'm going look again at people continuing a 1yo rewrite of some codebase, which noone {is willing / knows how to} touch... 2nd rewrite actually. You don't need to worry about the traffic and conversion rates when your application cannot be changed in any way and works only because it cannot stop.

synotic• 16 years ago

I think that this article is talking almost entirely about shipping. If you consider the start of Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr, a lot of what they had going for them was first-mover advantage and building out a product that people actually used. If Twitter started out trying to build the architecture they have now (http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2011/01/how-twitter-uses-n...), they probably would have never launched.

Re: refactoring and other comments. Of course optimizing and re-working your code for new use cases and scale issues is critical to support your product, but unless people are using it, you're not going to know what those use cases are and what parts of your product you need to scale.

DougBTX• 16 years ago

He says that his latest creation with "minimal" architecture hasn't shipped yet either, so this is all hot air.

wambie• 16 years ago

FTA: "The end result was mediocre product reviews and slow sales. But man, was my code beautiful."

The author is missing the point. Features and user experience drive sales not architecture or beautiful code. Sound architecture and clean code provides a basis for ongoing development. Simple once only app then be a cowboy and hack it together, want a product with an ongoing development cycle then care is needed when building the foundations. "An ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure" - Benjamin Franklin.

Jach• 16 years ago

Besides the reasons users benefit from good code, if your code is open source and you want anyone else to contribute it better be decent.

atomical• 16 years ago

What if your business is based on architecture? What if your customers are developers who care about a rock solid foundation?

statictype2• 16 years ago

Agreed. No one cares about whether you used lisp or C++.

What are the products that failed, not because they weren't popular or solved problems, but because they had a poor architecture or codebase?

I'm hard pressed to think of any.

Twitter had terrible scaling issues early on, but they solved it and are still successful.

I've heard that Flash's coded base is a steaming pile of unmaintainable C++ [citation needed]. But most of the backlash from Flash comes from the fact that it's proprietary and only partly from the fact that it runs poorly on non-Windows platforms.

Most products that fail because of poor technology choices do so before they ever get released so it's hard to judge whether or not the product would have ever been successful at all.

saurabhsharan• 16 years ago

But what if Adobe actually had (and maybe still are) tried to make Flash performant on non-Windows platforms, but can't because the codebase is such a mess? In that case, yes – Flash did fail because of a bad codebase. Then again, Flash is probably an extreme example, but it just goes to show that there is a point at which a bad codebase will interfere with your product.

evgen• 16 years ago

What are the products that failed, not because they weren't popular or solved problems, but because they had a poor architecture or codebase?

Friendster. With better architecture they are sitting on billions and Mark Z is writing code in a cubicle at Google...

statictype2• 16 years ago

What architecture issues caused Friendster to fail? I'm not very familiar with it.

yesno2• 16 years ago

They had a chance to make it better when they re-wrote their app from Java to PHP no? (If... that is their main cause of failure. Which probably isn't.)

beagle3• 16 years ago

No.

There were guys in Columbia university who (supposedly) had a much better system than Mark Z, and are probably writing code in a cubicle at Google or equivalent.

I suppose Zuckerberg got his start because he knows how to code, but he is an excellent CEO, something neither of these 2 guys nor Friendster had. Do you really think facebook is winning because of a better architecture?

I despise facebook, and don't use it. But I recognize that Zuckerberg has been doing an excellent job in growing the company, seizing opportunities, thinking huge, and most importantly -- bringing the right people in at the right time.

I tend to agree with Fred Wilson about the three things a CEO does: develop vision, acquire talent, raise money. Zuckerberg has done all three very, very well.

kragen• 16 years ago

What are the products that failed, not because they weren't popular or solved problems, but because they had a poor architecture or codebase?

I can think of a couple.

Friendster, as evgen points out. Probably MySpace. Zaplets, although it wasn't really their own code but rather Microsoft's. Quattro Pro for Windows. OpenOffice, although it's still struggling along. Netscape 5. Flash (you're wrong about the reason for the backlash --- the iPhone, iPad, and Kindle are just as proprietary.) Guile. mSQL. Arguably, F-83. WordStar 2000. Most likely, the entire pile of search engines trounced by Google in its first five years: Inktomi, AltaVista, Lycos, Excite, and so on. The GEM desktop, according to Steve Yegge. CERN httpd. Duke Nukem Forever. The GNU Hurd. INFORMIX-Online, probably, although again it's hard to tell from outside the company. Windows ME, in that it was the end of the Windows 95 codebase and was replaced by a better-architected codebase in the form of XP. Windows Vista, in that it shipped very late, missing most of the promised features, and was so sluggish that many people paid a premium to use XP instead. VisiCalc for MS-DOS. Anything written in BLISS-10, after the demise of the PDP-10. Almost anything written in 360 or 370 assembler when the mainframes got replaced. troff, which had to be rewritten as ditroff because nobody could maintain Ossanna's code after he died, although it's a peculiar sort of "failure" since it's still in use today. mod_svn (everybody uses svnserve now, right?) Zillions of Perl shopping cart scripts from the 1990s. Perl 6, probably.

There's an interesting distinction hiding here.

If you're putting together a web site where you're going to write articles about your local community and sell ads, you probably aren't going to be competing on the agility of your code. You're going to be competing on the quality of your writing (with a funny metric of "quality" where your optimum is cracked.com or eHow, not Faulkner or Hunter S. Thompson, but meh.) There's very little reason to take technology risks. You should install WordPress. If you do take technology risks, you're probably wanking but you're unlikely to make your product fail.

There are hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of products like this. Hacker News and Metafilter compete on the quality of their communities, not their codebase. Enterprise software competes on the skills of its salespeople, not whether or not the code actually works, let alone whether it's better than the competition.

On the other hand, if your code quality is actually what you're competing on --- if your users will pick your site instead of the competition's because you have better spam control, or faster page loads, or more richly linked data about Little League games, or a more usable user interface, or richer graphics --- then you're going to have to take technology risks. If you just use off-the-shelf code, your product will be easily surpassed by the competition. You have to take risks by trying some new things, and if your risks don't pan out, your product will fail.

blasdel2• 16 years ago

> Hacker News and Metafilter compete on the quality of their communities, not their codebase.

Ding Ding Ding!

A couple years ago at the Metafilter 10th anniversary party in Portland, after he made his entrance Matt Haughey walked right up to me and called me out for having made fun of his lack of programming skills in comments on his site -- it was then that I became enlightened: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1138506

j_baker2• 16 years ago

Bad architecture takes away your ability to iterate rapidly. Sure, writing crap code is fast at first. But if you let it continue, you end up with a difficult situation. You end up with a company where people work harder and harder and nothing gets done.

And yes I have seen companies go under for this. Either they lose their competitive advantage of working quickly or they lose customers because of stupid problems that could have been fixed with some planning.

mcantelon• 16 years ago

Meh. Pay at the beginning or pay 10 times over if you're forced to re-architect.

ct• 16 years ago

Or never launch because you're always worrying about the millions of users you'll never get because you're too busy trying to learn NOSQL instead of just using MySQL for the first iteration.

ceejayoz• 16 years ago

Paying 10 times the cost in the future may be easier than paying the cost today.

powdahound• 16 years ago

The real lesson here is "balance". You won't be successful if you have a kickass architecture and no users. You also won't be successful if you have users that are always frustrated because your site is slow or unavailable.

suprgeek• 16 years ago

Your Architecture needs to be "good enough". If you strive for the absolute best, most flexible, most extensible, blah blah, you will be stuck with analysis paralysis and spend too much time upfront with less information to make decisions. Conversely if you just begin coding with no plan - you will have an unstable product that will fall apart at the first instance of some deviation from the normal.

The (very hard) trick is to do a good enough job to deliver fairly quickly for a fairly stable product. Then be prepared to learn and refactor until it becomes better. How do you decide what is good enough? Experience...

napierzaza• 16 years ago

I love "why are you not rich yet?" articles. It's so motivating.

yesno2• 16 years ago

There's not enough detail of what kind of "gold platting" the author had done. Now I'm not an expert on "architectures" or "patterns" and my view is just a personal observation when I glanced over HN, slideshare.net, and InfoQ to some extend.

Often I saw 2 types of architectures:

1) System-Level

2) Component-Level

The System-Level type of architecture usually shows up in companies (or person that does the explanation) where the tools being used are UNIX-y: python, ruby, rails, django, apache, nginx, mysql, linux/command-line, syslog, etc. These people/companies tend to adopt a strong "pipe"-like architecture.

The mindset here is to write a program/application that does one thing really well.

The Component-Level type of architecture usually shows up in places where there's a strong OOP/Java/.NET culture. Often, this is the place where many people try to write the best damn code possible. You'll see some sort of "ManagerXYZ.java" or "XYZService.java" or "PolicyXYZ.java" or "XYZProvider.java". The Component-Level type of architecture tends to link many components tightly together and somehow each Component acts as if it is a "mini-API".

The mindset here is to write a library/component/class that does one thing really well.

Which one that the author chose?

Now when ugly code happens. Well.. I'd like to stay away from flame-war and all that stuff so I suppose you'd have to make your own judgement which way is better: System-level or Component-level.

lemmsjid• 16 years ago

This article makes such sweeping generalizations.

Customers may not care about the details of the architecture (they may not even know what 'software architecture' means), but rest assured they indirectly care about the architecture. As a layperson when it comes to automobile engineering, I only care about whether or not my Toyota works. But as a customer who relies on its safety, I assure you I care a great deal about whether or not it is well architected. As a layperson when it comes to structural engineering, I only care that my house stays up. But it better be well architected.

Don't mistake a customer's lack of caring about C# vs Java with them not giving a crap about whether or not your application will suddenly spew their credit card numbers to the world due to a slipshod security model. I don't care what approach Toyota took to form my transmission, but I would sue Toyota if my transmission suddenly broke and it turned out they'd put it together in a sloppy fashion.

Like all things, a customer's real care is based on a continuum. I don't care particularly if Reddit or Twitter goes down, but I care a great deal if Bank of America suddenly lowers my balance due to a rounding error.

Of course you can get overwhelmed by architectural possibilities. Assess your customers' expectations of your uptime, overall quality, etc. Assess your customers' expectations of your ability to release new features quickly. Assess projected scaling issues. Avoid buzzwords. Adjust accordingly. A foolish building architect could easily spend a year figuring out the ideal materials, but a competent one will still get the building done safely, on time and on budget. Same with software architecture.

derefr2• 16 years ago

> I don't care particularly if Reddit or Twitter goes down, but I care a great deal if Bank of America suddenly lowers my balance due to a rounding error.

I believe that, if you are writing the latter kind of software, you already know who you are and what you should be doing (whether or not you actually do it is another matter.) Most software isn't "important": it doesn't affect the user's life or health or wallet or relationships or anything when it screws up.

Defaulting to assuming your software needs to be as security/privacy/stability-conscious as online banking, is just as much of a waste of time for the average programmer as assuming every website will get hit with as much web traffic as Facebook/Google/etc. and so needs to be "web-scale." Your company's intranet to-do list won't get a million hits a day, and if it goes down, people will just write things down on paper instead. It can be a 20-line Python script. Really.

j_baker2• 16 years ago

Most software isn't important in the sense that it affects their lives. But it can affect their continued use of whatever it is that isn't working.

bad_user2• 16 years ago

Every time I tried Foursquare their service was down ("for maintenance" their page said). After ~ 5 attempts in ~ 5 different days I stopped trying. Maybe it was just my luck, but even Twitter has been more reliable for me.

I fail to see how this is not important: they haven't won a conversion out of me although I'm still getting spammed by them through my friends.

      Your company's intranet to-do list won't get a million hits a day,
      and if it goes down, people will just write things down on paper 
      instead.

If that to-do list goes down repeatedly, people will not use it ... it's hard enough to convince them to try it in the first place.

brudgers• 16 years ago

A case in point:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2062057

weixiyen• 16 years ago

I'm re-doing my architecture because it will allow me to push these said features out much faster.

EGreg• 16 years ago

Sorry man, I like architecting things. And as a result, I now have a framework that will help me crank out lots of stuff, instead of that one-off project.

ukorac• 16 years ago

Marcus Ranum on why bad architecture can lead to bigger problems for everyone else:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o59mQhBiUo4

Your Architecture Sucks and I Don't Care

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