> Good architecture is almost timeless.
Never dismiss the dangers of over-engineering. While not as terrifying as under-engineering, how useful is a feature that exists only for the purity of design?
Never dismiss the dangers of over-engineering. While not as terrifying as under-engineering, how useful is a feature that exists only for the purity of design?
However, over-engineering and spending quality time thinking about the design and domain are two separate things and typically the more you think about the design and domain the less likely you are to over-engineer.
Developers tend to want to generalise everything because it makes it more interesting and has the appearance of good design. But generalising in one direction reduces flexibility in other directions. Better to copy and paste a bit at first and wait a bit before adding that extra extraction layer that generalises Foo.
Very few workplaces will let you work hard for 5 hours solving problems in the most time effective way and then spend the next 3 hours on your personal development.
On the other hand you can always spread the work over 8 hours and "experiment" with "on the job learning" leaving all sorts of sub-optimal solutions in the project. Then the next guy goes "Why on earth did Jim use X here?" and the truthful answer is because Jim wanted to learn more about X.
The tried-and-true implementation has a known initial cost and cost scaling factor as it's repeated throughout an application, while an experimental (and overdesigned) one is extremely sensitive to context and could become a net negative if it fails.
When we talk about "technical debt," I think we're describing something that isn't an experimental design, it's just "below" the known standard - it's faster to implement, but it cannot scale, and we already know that. Conversely, a standard practice is one that works and doesn't usually get pushed to its tolerance limits.
The corollary of this is that for any engineering project taking on a big enough problem, you have to assume some technical debt to ground the system in a place where each module can be tested as part of a whole: otherwise your work will go too deep into the experimental/overdesigned zone before it ever completely functions.
Over-engineered components will work (sometimes flawlessly), so you don't realize you've spent too much time and money on something until long after you built it.
;)
I would much rather come across something under engineered than over engineered.