I wrote this text a few months ago while I was angry and decided not to publish it right away, letting it sink in. I kept it, made a few changes and finally decided to publish it.

I'm dumb

You're lucky. You're lucky because you're clever and I'm not.

I noted that I was dumb when I was unable to understand how some data was injected into an object during its instantiation.
I know what a depency injection manager is but that time was not like the others. It took me one hour to figure where that configuration parameter was coming from. I had to go through 8 code files and 3 configuration files and I had to make several full text searches in order to jump from file to file because following the code was misleading. This exercise was really hard to me because I'm barely able to remember my own phone number so I had to write down to paper your way to do DI because I couldn't keep it in memory.

I have to say that I started to be pissed off - allright, this is not uncommon - because your code was telling me that I was stupid, and no one likes beeing told he is stupid.

Someone then came by and told me it was the tool, a cool feature provided by the tool, that you were using. Again, I know what dependency injection manager is, and how it works, but that one magical feature which allows you to make the same thing as usual but in a very clever way, I don't know it. Probably because I had never needed it. I guess appart from beeing dumb I also lack of culture about that tool features.

I was sure that I was dumb when I couldn't understand what you're abstraction was for. For me all the interesting thing your code was doing was concentrated in one class. That one class I found after going through several classes doing I don't really know what. That one class which was wrapping a class from a library.

I probably missed something but I have to say that I started to be pissed off again - I think there is some kind of pattern here. I tried to understand, because, after all, you're clever. Why would you do something that complicated when just using the class from the library, or your wrapper, would have done the job ? Maybe you were protecting us from the coupling to that library and making its use simpler. I have to confess that I was surprised when I saw a massive chain of getters going all the way down to get the library object you were wrapping and pass it to the some other object.

Those are some of the times I noticed I was dumb. Hard truth...

Thank you for beeing an eye opener.

I used to be clever though

I used to be clever though. I used to write some pretty pieces of code doing all kind of cool stuff. I was theorically able to change the way the whole system was working by changing one parameter in a configuraion file. My code was able to cope with all future issues I had foreseen. I knew how to do some tricky things with all sort of tools.

But time goes on and aging probably made me dumb.

Aging or discoveries and failures.

Abstractions are good when you know what you're abstracting. Apparently you only know what your abstracting based on the information you currently have. I couldn't predict future and the next needs. I tried though, I failed, and ended up locked down by my clever abstraction. And as we all do I started to cheat, broke my abstraction, used getters in order to get the internals and be able to manipulate them.

Not once but several times.

I made complicated stuff too. They looked hard to understand at first glance but once you managed to wrap your head around the problem being solved, everyone could see how legant the solution was. At least, I was. I wrote it after all. Then I moved on, worked on something else and had to came by to it later probably because of something to fix. It seems like complicated code tend to be buggy. Worst, apparently time had increased code complexity. I was now unable to understand easily what was going on with this code and all the choices I made a few days before.

I have seen people reluctant to use some of my code. In my opinion it was not that hard to understand but they probably needed someone to guide them the first time they used the library because it was magic in some kind of way. We had a solution, we probably should have written documentation. Or simpler code : something the junior of your team can grasp by himself.

I was pissed with myself on those occasions.

I guess some time you will be pissed with yourself too. I hope so. It means your code is used, and that's cool.

Please stop

Please stop writing complicated stuff. It's harder to read, to understand, to test, and even to produce. Moreover it's unnecessary, it doesn't protect you from future requirements, it's hard and it costs time and money.

Please stop doing something everyone knows about in some other clever way. It's cool that you know everything about your tools, but what will be cooler is that you know when to use or not a feature. I don't want to be suprised while reading code.

I want to read code as I read books. Simple ones. Like Harry Potter. Translated in french. As I said, I'm dumb and I'm lazy...

Take a break, think two minutes about the piece of code you're about to craft : can you make it simple ? Can the dumbest person you know understand it ? Will he be surprised ?

As you've been an eye opener to me I hope these words will be an eye opener to you too.

Go write some code. Simple one.

Thanks a lot to Remi and Emilien for reviewing this post.

Whether you're clever or not we can discuss on Twitter. Feel free to comment below as well.