Programmer in Wonderland

Summary

The Wonderland of SoftwareThe ecosystem of software engineering is vast and it seems to be ever-growing, although recently at a slower pace. There are hundreds and thousands of tools and frameworks out there, often solving the same problems or struggling to explain what the problem they are trying to solve is. Sometimes, it can be quite confusing to ascertain whether solving a problem yourself would not be faster than researching and learning all the tools that are available out there. Sometimes, it begs the question: Does the ever increasing use of external tools and dependencies really make us more productive and our systems more reliable? Because of this diversity and how powerful some of these tools are, it often feels like Magic. So many things possible, so fast and seemingly without a cost, without tradeoffs. But is it really the case? There are multiple frontend frameworks and more ways of using them still and all the buzzwords! Should we build Single Page Application (SPA)? What about Global State Management? Micro Frontends anyone? What about Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? Shouldn't we use Server Side Rendering (SRR) and/or Static Site Generation (SSG) for it? What about Hydration? (hint: it is not related to water) In the same vein, there is a multitude of backend frameworks, tools and related buzzwords. Certainly, we like to talk about magical things like Object Relational Mapping (ORM), Non-blocking IO, Event Sourcing, Command and Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS), Service Meshes, Observability, Serverless Computing, Containerization or Virtualization that gets truly too virtual at times. In this bottomless ocean of abstractions, how to make sense of it all? As mentioned briefly, how we arrived at this point of relying on so many tools and abstractions, and whether it remains productive, is a separate topic I do not cover here. Fortunately, there is hope and a solution. Unfortunately, I think that the default reaction to this state of affairs is...