Fredrik talks to Christian Clausen about the many facets of simplicity.

The cloud and serverless was supposed to be simpler than running your own hardware, but you easily get stuck trying to select the right message bus, needing to know the intricacies of your chosen cloud provider infrastructure, and the like. You end up building your software around the infrastructure you’ve ended up with - rather than picking infrastructure which is right for your software.

The CFO should not be the architect of the software.

Core values and principles - set them up, reflect on them, and notice and decide what to do when they are broken. Should the system change if its core principles are broken, or should the principles be updated to reflect reality? Christian argues simplicity should be a core principle, and very carefully considered and encouraged.

There are enough barriers already, even before you start adding complexity around the problems you’re trying to solve.

And hide the things you do pull in behind true abstractions which don’t leak all over the place.

Don’t ask what you can add, ask what you can postpone.

Generality adds complexity. The more often something changes, the more specific it should be.

Where are the tools which suggest more things to remove instead of things to add?

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Links

Christian Øredev 2023 Designing infrastructure-free systems • - Christians Øredev 2023 talk

Merrymake • - Christian’s company

Five lines of code Nosql Conway • - don’t let HR be the architect Christian’s blog Spring Quarkus • - “supersonic subatomic Java”

Reactive programming Hibernate Gateway drug React Angular Vue • Google’s serverless is actually Knative Support us on Ko-fi! Redux Sonarqube Occam’s razor Cyclomatic complexity Don’t repeat yourself A/B testing Christian on Medium

Bonus links - thanks Tomas Kronvall!

Adding two numbers in Javascript Some additional backstory

Titles

• Life happened

• Serverless the right way

• It’s grown a lot

• I love refactoring

• Just as hard as choosing hardware

• Everything into one collection

• I don’t want the CFO to be the architect of the software

• It disappears immediately

• Entropy for the real world

• I came back after six years

• Why though?

• Why do you have this?

• What problem couldn’t you solve without it?

• There are enough barriers already

• Just use +

• Zero of the founding principles

• But it looks like ice cream

• I’ve always hated frameworks

• I feel like I’m writing Javascript

• Was the salary worth it?

• Lending the money to your future self

• What can I postpone?

• Generalization land

• Suggest I remove things!

• Is this the right problem to have?

• I want to say no more

• Humans can build this