What is the birthdate of the last framework you’re working with? Why have you chosen it? Did you choose it?
I feel more and more puzzled by the state of our industry, and how we’re used to deal with the fact that we suck at building software. I think a part of it might be due to a feeling that the problem is how fast we can build software. Spoiler alert: writing code isn’t the bottleneck.
Why frameworks exist?
They usually promise you to avoid writing tons of “boiler plate” code. This code that has absolutely no value to your business, but still is not optional to make your system work in production.
In other words, frameworks are here to “increase” your productivity by gaining time to write code that matters for your business.
What frameworks usually forget to tell you is that the time you’ll get by avoiding boiler plate code will mostly be used to understand and configure the framework. No pain no gain, right?
A pact with the devil.
But the worst part of it is not that it will take you time to configure. It’s that you are now highly dependent of a framework. It matters because frameworks are opinionated. They are here to solve problems, but the way they solve them might not be exactly what you need on your project. And to be fair, I’ve seen this many times: in the end you’ll burn 95% of your energy trying to make the business fit your framework, instead of building a software fitting your business.
Do you want to understand problems or solutions?
And let me add this important point: you should never use a framework if you don’t understand all the problems it’s solving. By building your expertise over a framework, you are building your expertise on a solution. And if you do not understand the problems, you are an imposter, because bringing a solution is not enough to be a software professional. You have to understand and challenge the problems.
Writing code isn’t the bottleneck.
Believe it or not, writing code is cheap. The cost is in maintenance and communication. Thus all efforts made in order to deliver features faster are false friends when they increase the burden in maintenance and/or communication. The real challenge is to keep the code easy to change.
Writing code isn’t the bottleneck.