Why Can't We Make Simple Software? - Peter van Hardenberg

[@Drudge.Miller]

1:40 Chapter 1 What is complexity 3:38 Chapter 2 A bestiary of software complexity 4:00 Defensive Code 6:53 Defensive Code Observations 7:37 Scale 9:50 Scale Observations 10:31 Leaky Abstraction Observations 12:48 Model/Reality Gaps 16:35 Hyperspace 18:34 Chapter 3 Homeostasis 19:53 Complexity homeostasis 24:20 Chapter 4 Theories of complexity 29:25 Chapter 5 Living with Complication 39:14 Complexity Quotes 36:48 "Simplification via amputation." 38:36 "I'm fixing computers that don't exist, in a data center I've never been to, for people I've never met." Thank you very much for the talk.

[@Drudge.Miller]

Hey Handmade Cities, the like is lovely but it would have been nice if you asked if you can copy my comment to your description and pinned my comment. Now it looks like I copied it. "little bit mad smiley". However, thanks for the upload of the talk.

[@petervanhardenberg]

Thanks @Drudge.Miller! Appreciate you taking the time.

[@garydeschaines]

Peter, Thank you for an excellent attentional and rational presentation covering software complexity which captured my acknowledgement and understanding of complexity gained through professional and personal software programming experiences over the past 50 years. Respectfully, Gary

[@devsuvara]

Fellow DS and GBA developer! Shake my hand! :)

[@RolandoGarza]

38:36 "I'm fixing computers that don't exist, in a datacenter I've never been to, for people I've never met." What an epic quote!

[@marksmithcollins]

That is how weak modern techie humans can earn their food without having the deer hunting skills. You can earn your money from the people you've never seen, convincing them to pay you.

[@JordanManfrey]

This presentation is basically the talk I have with every stakeholder at some point but most of it just gets dismissed as “nerd shit”

[@mustardofdoom]

We can all seek to be better communicators. Being correct is not always the right way to approach the discussion. And don't be afraid of analogy. In this case, we are talking about the difference between jotting down a grocery list versus writing an entire encyclopedia. Most people will get that those are very different problems.

[@alvaromoe]

@@mustardofdoom dude, what makes you think that OP is "afraid of analogies"? What if he's a great communicator but the other party is refusing to listen? Ironic that you start by "we can all seek to be better communicators" and follow up with such a patronizing comment.

[@sp3ctum]

I have had to have this conversation with some business people. Most seem to understand ok when using layman's terms to explain why something cannot be done, for example. Then there are the ones that really do refuse to listen. They may be looking for a short time benefit like a bonus, and want to switch companies the next year anyway. I don't know what to do about those.

[@Alceste_]

@@alvaromoe I think regardless of whether OP is already a great communicator or not, a philosophical tip on how the only thing we can really control is the way we present information (and not the way people stay firmly unable to understand shit), followed by general tip on how some achieve getting understood is a fairly okay intervention. Didn't come off as particularly insulting / patronizing to me.

[@bojcio]

This presentation is basically the talk I have with every skateboarder at some point but most of it just gets dismissed as “nerd shit”

[@GurtTarctor]

A really good general talk about complexity/simplicity is Alan Kay's "Power of Simplicity" talk, the key aphorism of which is "You get simplicity by finding a slightly more sophisticated building block to build your theories out of." Highly recommended.

[@ximono]

That's a great quote from a great talk (by a great man).

[@orpal]

On the seatbelt stuff: I highly recommend the book "killed by a traffic engineer" It talks about how road designs that "make roads safer" like wider lanes and such actually cause people to drive faster and crash more often.

[@TheSummersilk]

And motorcycle helmets - they increase your survival in the event of a collision, but dramatically raise the chances of you getting yourself into one.

[@_Zaid]

@@TheSummersilk I demand a source for this claim. As an avid rider I've researched helmets extensively- I've emailed researchers to get copies of their papers and have read the ECE 22.06 helmet standard cover to cover. I have _never_ heard this claim or seen any evidence for it.

[@HeadsFullOfEyeballs]

@@_Zaid I don't have a source for you, but this comes up a lot in bicycle discourse. The explanation I've heard for this phenomenon (assuming it's real) is that seeing protective equipment on you makes car drivers more reckless around you because you appear less fragile. So it's not that you get _yourself_ into more accidents if you wear a helmet, it's that motorists get you in more accidents.

[@ecosta]

@@_Zaid It's hard to study or create evidences - one can't measure "risk of collision" because it is a "risk" not a "certainty". No study or standard will ever be able to cover "humans not understanding helmets like you". I can give a lot of examples of how people negate any helmet benefits: where I live there are a lot of bikers wearing extra helmet on their arm, not strapping the helmet, wearing it with an open visor, drilling holes to install a camera, wearing headphones inside it, gluing trinkets, using the helmet as a weapon then using the same helmet as helmet, etc...

[@_Zaid]

@@ecosta You can do comparative studies between similar populations that with different helmet use, either in the same location or in two similar locations with different helmet laws. These studies have been done and there's no supporting evidence for this claim. KZbin loves to eat my links but key terms are "Helmet use" and "Injury rate".

[@MattWyndham]

This is the whole fun part of Factorio, constantly growing the complexity as you grow the factory and your goals.

[@HrHaakon]

The factory must grow to meet the growing demands of the factory.

[@Martinit0]

The whole point of computer games is to add complexity to your otherwise simple and boring life. It is optional though and we can leave it behind at any time.

[@w花b]

​@@Martinit0 Same goes for real life. Nothing stops you from quiting that job lol. The stakes are simply different but there's nothing stopping you.

[@jonascarvalho7331]

What an outstanding presentation! Your eloquence, sense of humor, captivating theme, seamless coherence between the slides and your narration, and, above all, your incredible charisma made it truly remarkable. Thank you!

[@heckyes]

"Thank god every now and then someone does actually re-invent the wheel - lest they all be made of stone"

[@outwithrealitytoo]

"many articulation points in a distributed system with more free variables , more places where things can go fast or slow, or arrive out of order". I love the term "articulation points". If you think of a system as a structure with components under compression and tension, more points of articulation makes you see why complexity is an issue.

[@Sheblah1]

It's like sandpile dynamics

[@csours]

21:44 "Some people are just smarter than me and understand the more complex system they made" Not in my experience. They just implemented write only code. They understand it because THEY BUILT IT. If someone else made it they would have almost as hard a time understanding it as an average developer.

This is me looking at this moment at a BE I designed years ago, that it's broken because of an update and not understanding what it does.

[@D4no00]

I tend to agree with this, but at the same time the definition of smart is so subjective, that even that other statement it's true. From my experience, keeping unnecessary complexity out of a codebase is very hard work and it's an actual upfront resource investment, because it takes more time to do properly. Companies love developers that dwelve into complexity because they can deliver "fast" and a lot of managers that sadly are decision-makers in most of those companies care only about having the ability to deliver fast, very few of them care about long-term impact as the only thing they have to do is to leave that project when it gets to the point that it explodes. The sad truth is also that a lot of products can easily get away with being written in this way, as the profitability of the business is usually the core pillar that keeps the project alive, it's very rare that it is related to how well the product was made.

[@rumplstiltztinkerstein]

Me writing super complex code: "I am so smart" Me after 1 hour break: "What the heck was I trying to do here?"

[@JordanManfrey]

in my experience what helps me is constantly trying to view every abstraction or interface I create from a “would this piss me off if I saw it in a random library” perspective. Empathy and self-critique is the key to writing software that isn’t trash to read

[@storage9578]

the missing piece: Skill isn't static. 5y later you look with a beginner skill at something you wrote on expert level. Same if you look at someone else's code. Documentation often is inadequate because being self-aware of what part of your knowledge is nontrivial is hard. You only notice its bad when you look at it as a stranger years later.

[@elektro-peter1954]

Why can I give only one Thumb up on this? Man - this guy is just amazing! We can't have simple things because of reasons! What he describes is exactly like my work - the software just becomes as complex as it can under these conditions. That's just how it is. What a realization!

[@this-is-bioman]

Software becomes complex (whatever this means) because of carelessness.

[@tabletuser123]

@@this-is-biomanyou dont actually program anything meaning if u think this lmao

[@this-is-bioman]

@@tabletuser123 or maybe you're just too afraid to accept the truth of your negligence when programming ;-]

[@albertweber1617]

In games it's a huge challenge to eradicate the side-effects of implementation complexity, but you have to actually grow and nurture the gameplay complexity. You have to create an expressive language and system that can only expresses itself in "fun" ways, and it's so fucking difficult.

[@lobovutare]

Programming is the art of making complexity trade-offs. In order to become a guru you need to work on a single software product for a decade. Things that never crossed your mind would ever become a problem, now become a problem. You learn through regret.

[@PavelHenkin]

'you learn through regret' is a very true line.

[@ThePC007]

Or things that you thought could become a problem and that you therefore planned ahead for, turn out to become an even bigger problem than you had anticipated, for which reason your prematurely implemented solution won't save you. :(

[@brdrnda3805]

Yep, and then you are assigned to the team that creates the successor of that single software product and people just ignore you when you tell not to do x (and explain why) because you're an old f*ck, who doesn't understand the fancy new technology.

[@noahw4623]

​@@PavelHenkin I love it, it's great

[@kudorgyozo]

"You learn through regret" I felt that on a deep emotional level

[@JordanManfrey]

EF6 reminds me of the “dangerously powerful abstraction”. It’s an ORM that can do anything - but if you do certain things it will pull basically the whole database in a single query into memory implicitly at runtime and good luck figuring out when it wants to do that

33:28 This is what Terry A. Davis di with Temple OS. He reduced possibilities and set hard constraints.

[@widget5963]

I think one of the important things that doesn't really get much time in the talk is that moving complexity off to libraries and services means we can write software that does many more things with smaller budgets. Webapps are popular not only because they're the only truly cross-platform environment, but because they ship with a very flexible rendering engine and huge ecosystem support for many frameworks. I think the real complexity is hidden in state management. External (outside your computer) dependencies add more state to track. User interaction adds more state. File access adds state. Multi-step UI flows add state. Updating third-party dependencies (often for potential security issues) is state (on the dev's side) that changes and can mess up your code. All of these state-heavy systems can fail at various points, requiring other parts of your applications' state to update in response. It's covered somewhat in the NxM complexity section but I think it could use more focus.

[@mo3k]

Great talk. I appreciate the work put into this. "Reinventing the wheel" is how we can figure out how it works in order to better improve on it. I believe we can learn to build better things in simpler ways...but first, we have to build simpler things in better ways.

[@lifelover69]

Awesome talk, insightful, and funny. I feel that it's grounded, based on Peter's industry experience, but also hopeful for a better future by innovating out of current mess, based on Peter's research background. Exciting!

We need to talk more about complexity in the software industry :) Nice talk, I really enjoyed it. There's a minor "mistake", though. Accidental and Essential complexity concepts were introduced by Frederick Brooks in his brilliant paper: No Silver Bullet. Moseley and Marks did an outstanding job by elaborating further these concepts, though. Great talk Mr Van Hardenberg.

[@bfors8498]

Great talk, I'm glad this was recommended to me

[@TythosEternal]

Phenomenal. I thought i was the only person thinking this way. Well done.

[@whattube7538]

This talk is great! It’s succinctly put so many of my intuitive thoughts into concrete descriptions!

[@TheMohawkNinja]

"Vigilance is not a strategy" Oh, it very much is. Ask anyone who works with anything physically dangerous for a living (heavy machinery, firearms, etc.) and there is one thing you will hear repeated throughout all of these industries: You don't blindly trust safety. Even when you are 100% sure the gun doesn't have any bullets in it, you still don't point it at anyone until that barrel is physically removed from the gun. Likewise, you don't stick your hand in a piece of heavy machinery until the power has been physically disconnected and the appropriate lockout/tagout procedure has been carried out. When it comes to coding, never just trust that the library will be perfectly secure or even intuitively coded. You really should audit the source code (or at least the documentation) of the library to know exactly how it handles edge cases and code accordingly. Just the other day I found out that I couldn't even assume that std::stoi() in a try/catch would ensure that the input string is a valid integer because std::stoi("123 hello") will return 123.

[@JoeJoeTater]

It bugs me that he uses "complexity" and "complication" interchangeably. They're different things, and I don't think you can effectively manage either one without that distinction. Complexity is difficulty emerging from simple interactions. Complication is difficulty from an accumulation of exceptions. Lambda calculus is complex. HTML/CSS is complicated.

[@brucewilliams6292]

Thanks for putting this up. The speaker definitely has experienced the edge case biting the bum.

[@tutacat]

By the time you calculate the timezones, there is a new update to implement to them.

[@the_magnus]

Such a great, fun, relevant to-the -point experienced-based talk. Thank you, eatching this made my morning routine vastly improved.

[@systemsincode7023]

I think I'll be rewatching this a few times and nodding in agreement each time.

[@user-fed-yum]

If more people could grasp these simple complicated concepts and have a real world exposure to them, our world would be a better place.

[@Muskar2]

I've had enough of authoritative software opinions/commentary and minimal falsifiable statements and evidence. But at least we can agree on a vision of simpler software

[@orange-vlcybpd2]

5:30 refers to "Shotgun parsers in the cross-hairs" from BruCON Security Conference

[@Vondanzigkungfu]

Thank you ♥

[@AntonioRonde]

Superb talk! Thank you Mr. van Hardenberg

[@aliothspectranet5678]

Regarding the seatbelt thing, is there data to suggest that people drive riskier now than they did prior to the mandate?

[@aliothspectranet5678]

and I'm not talking about people immediately after the mandate, I'm talking about nowadays when most people dont know life without it

[@Tom-bp6no]

Look up the Tullock Spike 😅

[@aliothspectranet5678]

@ absolute gigachad

[@ximono]

24:28 Come on, cyclomatic complexity was the most interesting part! All code is essentially a directed graph. I think it's very useful to see it that way. It's not just a metric. Great talk!

[@jack-d2e6i]

Not if goto has anything to say about it!

[@tabletuser123]

@@jack-d2e6inobody has written a single goto statement in 20 years

[@ximono]

@@jack-d2e6i Even code with goto can be modelled as a graph, each goto an edge between points in code. Spaghetti code.

[@jack-d2e6i]

@@ximono I was specifically referring the "directed" qualifier. Once you have cycles, is not just a degenerate graph?

[@jack-d2e6i]

Looks like I'm wrong. I guess I thought directed graphs were necessarily acyclic, which is false.

[@CaioCodes]

What an awesome talk, really engaging!

[@SianaGearz]

Aaah the seatbelt story and Peltzman effect. Aka the dangers of taking one study and basing your life philosophy around it, no matter if its methods have since been deemed faulty and whether there's research with entirely opposite conclusions been performed numerous times since.

[@ruanmed]

Yeah, well, his specific assumption about the homeostasis of car accidents being due to people being more comfortable with seatbelts is wrong because seatbelts infact reduced fatal accidents as far as I know. However, at the same the cars evolved in other aspects giving more general stability to all cars (suspension improvements are a great example), so yeah, in many ways I can see how people would be more willing to take more risks while driving, backing up his homeostasis idea, however yeah, I agree it would more interesting to present actual factual data, or at least based on multiple studies and not some rebuked stuff.

[@Croix1]

@@ruanmedyeah i can also see how it makes sense, but it's not the actual reality. that risk homeostasis is just not real. just because something sounds sensible doesn't mean it's true. that's called the common sense fallacy

[@rontarrant]

I find it interesting that the examples in Mr. Kernighan's book, The C Programming Language, use Allman-style curly brace placement. :)

[@orderandchaos_at_work]

The times we've been through this, it hurts.

[@nnov_tech_chan7891]

It is good when author speaks out literally my thoughts, even if it is a controversy. We are thinking in the same way.

[@meatcow417]

Great talk. Good examples, and great external references.

[@--2-3---]

Useful information, I hope more people can learn from this. Thank you for the presentation!

[@PaulSpades]

Almost every talking point is amazingly superficial and verifiably incorrect. This talk reminded me why I stopped listening to programming talks years ago. People, just read 5 times more source code than you write, that's the best advice I've ever seen that works.

[@lepidoptera9337]

Why would I read code by other people? I am the better coder by far. And boy am I a crappy code... but that just tells you how bad code is, on average. ;-)

[@PaulSpades]

@@lepidoptera9337 Of course.

[@josephbolton8092]

Informed and engaging talk ❤

[@ArielBenichou-cx3vu]

i'm glad youtube showed me this. great talk!

[@morwar_]

Complexity is good because it creates demand. Listening to this talk made me realize you have to find people that like you and you like them so you can work together in things that you both find interesting. Being hired by someone just to keep up with the complexity is bad because if you fix it everybody might lose their jobs.

[@winkbrace]

There is always something to do, unless the business has gone bankrupt. This idea of keeping up complexity is silly.

[@morwar_]

@@winkbrace It is not, you just have been very lucky to work on amazing companies. It is a jungle out there.

[@helcacke]

Great talk, I specifically enjoyed the idea of reducing scope to just try building with what you know. I struggle with that a lot, and think AI will help with that... if we can figure out how that would work in scope 😂

[@lukor-tech]

Very light and approachable with difficult subjects in the background. Thanks!

[@xremming]

Excellent talk!

[@JordanManfrey]

16:20 “it ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble - it’s what you know for sure that just aint so”

[@JordanManfrey]

36:48 if you can’t run it locally, it’s architected like shit or you’ve married yourself to shit tooling or bad vendors. People who write bespoke stuff against a single cloud vendor’s product line with zero apprehensions scare the shit out of me

[@YeloPartyHat]

Amen

[@barbaldo]

Completely agree. At work I'm doing exactly that and I want to cry

[@Voy2378]

Stupid YT blocks final slide with related videos, maybe Handmade Cities in the future can make sure to put some filler seconds at the end with their logo so presentation is not ruined.

[@DodaGarcia]

All aspects of the end screen (its elements, layout and timing) are customizable by the uploader.

[@dancing_frank_lee]

Absolutely love this! 🌟

[@stratfanstl]

Great presentation. I was a bit distracted for the first ten minutes while trying to recall who the speaker sounded like. Then it hit me. He sounded exactly like Dave Grohl (of the Foo Fighters) talking about software.

[@bettercallsean]

I was thinking the exact same thing!

[@Mograw]

I was hopeful someone else would notice! If Dave ever needs to tap out and this coding thing isn't cutting it anymore, this guy would be a great candidate 😂

[@smort123]

Johnathan Blow literally crying and shaking after watching this

[@JordanManfrey]

He’s like an academic that releases games instead of white papers, software engineering isn’t really his thing lol

[@dirtiestbomb1715]

He's a prime example of the "gazing into the void" that van Hardenberg was talking about. He's dove deep into complexity by writing own esoteric language and compiler, gaining excellent runtime benefits but at the major cost of nobody except him ever having a chance to use or improve his tools.

[@Wave_Commander]

@@dirtiestbomb1715 that's not entirely true. They do have a closed beta for jai that has just been limited to people that are actually interested in using it for large scale projects and games

[@Muskar2]

@@dirtiestbomb1715 Skewing the facts without technically being wrong in a contrarian way is what gets traction, I guess. This is the time I don't love the Internet

[@flavour-of-qualia]

this is gold. love ink and switch

[@Maxjoker98]

The Excel team not wanting to use an "external"(as in team, not even company) C compiler sounds absolutely insane.

[@awvalenti]

This talk answered many existential questions I had for decades... Especially the part "better tools won't solve the problem". Thanks 🙏!!

[@IvanyaKosmos]

leaky abstraction example doesn't have a leak, it's just an abstraction

[@RobertBlair]

Shout-out for using "Shovelware" idiom!

[@drelijahmikail3916]

Most people are already either suffering or muffed to silence on the current status quo of IT janitoring. The problem with inventing new languages is ITU (Inventing The Unnecessary). It is akin how Dr Nobel Price invent the talky stick on Sesame Street.

[@DarylMetzler]

So good! Excellent talk

[@greenageguy]

I like to think of software complexity as entropy. Entropy is always increasing but we can control the rate of growth by being deliberate.

[@AlexGalo0]

I love this, please do more

This is a great talk

[@mikestaub]

So much wisdom here. The only thing I disagree with is that tools WILL save us. Once the LLMs get better and the RAG solutions improve we can offload most of the complexity to them.

[@lepidoptera9337]

Yes, and you will need other LLMs to check the work of the first LLMs because it's not engineering until you have one stochastic parrot validate another. ;-)

[@ZE_TRVTH_NVKE]

We, who care about efficiency for our own sake, can, but the people, who only care about their wages, can't.

[@thewhitefalcon8539]

Why would you care about more if you don't get paid to care?

[@ZE_TRVTH_NVKE]

@thewhitefalcon8539 Exactly. If they didn't have a job, in which they don't have a stake, they wouldn't care about anything, because they don't have their own ideology of life.

[@RR-hl6zi]

We're not doing charity work, so throwing the 'wages' argument in is a bit dishonest.

[@siddharthkrishna8463]

People paying the wages should pay them to care then

[@ZE_TRVTH_NVKE]

@@siddharthkrishna8463 If they won't make a simple system for free - for themselves - they won't do it for money - someone else - either.

[@philipoakley5498]

if "complexity occurs when systems have internal interactions" (& when stuff bumps into each other) then it's a thermodynamics 101 problem [statistical mechanics even] of determining the system _temperature_ and which adjacent system is hotter (the chaos will flow from there)

[@spee8888]

anyone know who did the block prints for the slide visuals?

[@steffengroenandersen]

18:51 Seatbelts definitely save lives... I understand his point but he should chosen another metaphor.

[@snorman1911]

I think you missed the point.

[@steffengroenandersen]

@snorman1911 Can you elaborate?

[@widget5963]

@@steffengroenandersen Seatbelts save lives in the same types of crashes. But when you put seatbelts on people, they feel safer, so they drive in riskier ways. They end up in worse crashes than before, and the net effect is that the same amount of people are killed/injured overall. (In this specific case, the real answer is to make sure people don't drive in riskier ways. There's loads of advocates on and off KZbin for methods to slow down cars without affecting traffic much.)

[@LowestofheDead]

What's interesting is that his seatbelt example was actually debunked. And his Jevon's paradox ignores that we get a better and cheaper products when consumption increases to a new limit.

[@SuperOblivionfan]

Yo I loved teenage zombies as a kid, def gunna watch the rest of the talk now lol

[@BramHarmsen]

great talk!

[@StarryNightSky587]

This is great, why does it have so few views?

[@jordanhowlett9172]

Not anymore :0

[@muesique]

So true! But it's going both ways. If you scale up things happen that are told here. But same things going to happen when you scale down. You develop and test on a desktop but your target is a raspberry zero. And suddenly your wifi hangs or computation lasts forever! Things you could have done with scripting now need to be in machine code now.

[@TryboBike]

As information processing system grows, it tends to a state where it uses infinite resources to do absolutely nothing.

[@Cortex403]

A skiing teacher told me a similar thing: when ski slopes were more wild and difficult, people were paying attention. Now that they are wide and easy and well marked, people just go as fast as they like without carring and there are more accidents.

[@adaroben1104]

But wouldn't there be more people - and more careless people - who ski because it's more accessible? When skiing is hard it attracts the very foolish and very careful, when easy it attracts all of the mid-fools and mid-carefuls. You're not wrong but there could be more factors.

[@ArielBenichou-cx3vu]

the fonts on those slides 😙👌

[@miquelbrazil]

I thought I was the only person that noticed things like this 😍

[@ArielBenichou-cx3vu]

@@miquelbrazil do you know what is the typeface used? now i'm intrigued

[@digriberis6547]

Really enjoyed the illustrations as well!

My cents - Building defensive code, sucks when you have to debug when everyone gets "hello There". - his final memo: run local first, basically what docker+micro services made possible. :D

[@lepidoptera9337]

Bwahhhahaha... they really sold you on that one, didn't they. ;-)

[@armanrozika]

oh the title, it's actually a question, not a complain haha

[@nycdotnet4751]

Great talk!

[@alter_ukko]

35:52 +100 for the East Fork coffee mug

[@ecosta]

33:00 "We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings." --Ursula K. Le Guin (IMO it was a powerful take on breaking the status-quo)

[@EmmanuelMess]

One thing you don't really mention is the complexity of the teams working of the software.

[@JordanManfrey]

Would be fun to talk about how the complexity is often limited to the capacity of the dumbest developer on the team

[@tallreed0]

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

[@EmmanuelMess]

@@tallreed0 Yes, but I would like to hear what he had to say about conway's law affecting complexity.

[@florence-himeap]

38:36 as a novice programmer, i felt that.

[@plateoshrimp9685]

If you want to do less with less it's also pretty easy to set up an environment to develop for the Game Boy, NES, or DOS, or ??? In addition to the simplicity, there's also the fact that the architecture is set in stone. If your application runs on the original hardware, you did it right.

[@devsuvara]

Fellow DS and GBA developer! Shake my hand! :)

[@AndreaPassagliaAP]

The ai generated images are really terrible

[@edwardmacnab354]

instead of catching the error just be more informative at the outset what must be specific about the input so that if the 500 comes back you know you made an input error and try again .

[@snorman1911]

Then you end up wasting tons of time trying to figure out what the cause was. I just added exception handling for db timeouts and return a 504 so the FE devs can know a metrics call simply timed out or it failed due to a hard error I need to be bugged about. Errors about input validation have saved countless hours of debugging.

[@christianagava]

really good stuff

[@EnriqueSalceda-k4v]

Defensive programming does not always leads to such a complexity overhead. It depends how its implemented.

[@jeanklein2198]

Peter's voice sounds like Dave Grohl. Great talk btw

[@bersi3306]

From The Zen of Python: "Complex is better than complicated."

[@spacewad8745]

good talk

[@marksmithcollins]

38:36 That is how weak modern techie humans can earn their food without having the deer hunting skills. You can earn your money from the people you've never seen, convincing them to pay you.

[@henrykkaufman1488]

You know why? Because converter from TextMate text editor theme format (xml) to VS Code editor theme format (json) is only available through npm, so I have to get npm, and npm needs nodejs, so I have to get node. To convert from XML to json i need a package manager software and node.js runtime envirnoment! Where are we living??? It's easier for me to code a makeshift converter relying on documentation XD

[@IkarusKommt]

Holy f**k! One needs to install an interpreter to use scripts in its language! What's happened to the world?!!!1111

[@henrykkaufman1488]

@IkarusKommt seems like you suggest im unreasonable for expecting planets most common file format, offline converter app to work without package installer and and a dedicated server runtime. Maybe, but just to be clear - it's javascript. You have the interpreter in all your browsers and all your electron apps.

[@bartech101]

If David Grohl was a Software Engineer he would be called Peter van Hardenberg

[@Ollerismo]

😂

[@Suzi-QCodes-gh9rp]

I'm waiting for Peter to break out his Gretch

[@vacyyyy]

is this an old talk? i feel like ive heard this before

[@asdqwe4427]

Because we have product owners and customers

[@Summanis]

Don't let the Standard C++ Foundation see 24:00

[@EvenTheDogAgrees]

Hahah, not that far into the video yet, but let me guess. "Question"? 😂

[@edencandelas]

embrace complexity

[@John-p6u]

Because there is no demand for it. People want more functionality. The only possible way to simplify things is to better organize.