Bulldozer00's Blog

Suppose you’re developing a software-intensive product and you have to choose to write your app code on top of two competing infrastructure platforms:

Well, duh. I think I’ll take the candidate on the left. That way, if the code I write ends up being costly to maintain, it’s all my fault. I wasn’t “forced” to write crappy, jaggy code by having to comply with the platform:

But wait! Suppose either the clean infrastructure doesn’t exist or (more likely) you’re “mandated” to write your apps on top of the jaggy infrastructure. In this situation, here’s the best and worst we can do:

In both cases, our code has some unwanted  “jagginess” to it – some forced upon us by the platform and some we introduced ourselves.

In summary, our code can take on one of the forms below. The two on the left, written on top of the clean infrastructure, are less costly to maintain than the two written on the right.

So, what’s the purpose of this post? Uh, I dunno. I started sketching out the graphics first and then I thought some interesting insight would pop up as I wrote the accompanying words. But other than the utterly obvious advice to “choose a clean infrastructure over a jaggy infrastructure when you can“, nothing arose.

Writing is sometimes like that. You have nothing to say, but you write and babble away anyway. In case you haven’t noticed, I do that a lot. Bummer.