Bulldozer00's Blog

When you’re designing and happily coding away in the application layer and you discover a nasty bug, don’t you hate it when you find that the chances are high that the critter may not be hiding in your code – it may be in one of the cavernous homegrown libraries that prop your junk up. I hate when that happens because it forces me to do a mental context switch from the value-added application layer down into the support layer(s) – sometimes for days on end (ka-ching, ka-ching; tic-toc, tic-toc).

Compared to writing code on top of an undocumented, wobbly, homegrown BBoM, writing code on top of a professionally built infrastructure with great tutorials and API artifacts is a joy. When you do find a bug in the code base, the chances are astronomically high that it will be in your code and not down in the infrastructure. Unsurprisingly, preferring the professional over the amateur saves time, money, and frustration.

For the same strange reason (hint: ego) that command and control hierarchy is accepted without question as the “it just has to be this way” way of structuring a company for “success“, software developers love to cobble together their own BBoM middleware infrastructure. To reinforce this dysfunctional approach, managers are loathe to spend money on battle-tested middleware built by world class experts in the field. Yes, these are the same managers who’ll spend $100K on a logic analyzer that gets used twice a year by the two hardware designer dudes that cohabitate with the hundreds of software weenies and elite BMs inside the borg. C’est la vie.