<story><title>90% of software engineering done today is integrating poorly documented APIs</title><url>https://twitter.com/Austen/status/1520792630853918722</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jseban</author><text>90% of my software engineering is fighting with incomprehensible framework magic to automates simple tasks that don&amp;#x27;t need to be automated, to &amp;quot;save me&amp;quot; from just writing some simple code. It&amp;#x27;s literally rube goldberg all the way, the most over complex contraptions to achieve the simplest of tasks.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;You don&amp;#x27;t want to write &amp;quot;raw&amp;quot; html&amp;#x2F;js&amp;#x2F;sql&amp;#x2F;Java&amp;quot; Uhm I thought that was my job.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>twblalock</author><text>&amp;gt; &amp;quot;You don&amp;#x27;t want to write &amp;quot;raw&amp;quot; html&amp;#x2F;js&amp;#x2F;sql&amp;#x2F;Java&amp;quot; Uhm I thought that was my job.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not your job, any more than a firefighter&amp;#x27;s job is to be a hose operator, or a nurse&amp;#x27;s job is to be a syringe operator.&lt;p&gt;Your job is to produce software that meets the requirements of the business, as a member of a larger engineering organization which needs to be able to function well enough to deliver that software.&lt;p&gt;Why are frameworks popular? Because they provide a standardized way for multiple engineers, and multiple engineering teams, to collaborate effectively on the same product -- and they make it easy to hire people who already know the frameworks.&lt;p&gt;If everyone is writing &amp;quot;raw&amp;quot; JS&amp;#x2F;HTML&amp;#x2F;SQL&amp;#x2F;Java&amp;#x2F;whatever, they are actually building their own individual, unstandardized frameworks.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s not good for supporting software when the author leaves, and it raises the barrier enormously for onboarding new people. Above a certain scale it&amp;#x27;s just not workable.&lt;p&gt;You can be cynical about this and say that it reduces engineers to interchangeable cogs in a machine. Or, you can understand why things are the way they are, understand how to succeed in this reality, and build a fulfilling career path for yourself by providing value that a mere cog cannot. I&amp;#x27;ve worked with a lot of successful, happy engineers who are not cogs, and what separates them from the others is not coding skill -- it&amp;#x27;s that they all understand this reality.</text></comment>
<story><title>90% of software engineering done today is integrating poorly documented APIs</title><url>https://twitter.com/Austen/status/1520792630853918722</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jseban</author><text>90% of my software engineering is fighting with incomprehensible framework magic to automates simple tasks that don&amp;#x27;t need to be automated, to &amp;quot;save me&amp;quot; from just writing some simple code. It&amp;#x27;s literally rube goldberg all the way, the most over complex contraptions to achieve the simplest of tasks.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;You don&amp;#x27;t want to write &amp;quot;raw&amp;quot; html&amp;#x2F;js&amp;#x2F;sql&amp;#x2F;Java&amp;quot; Uhm I thought that was my job.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ecshafer</author><text>This is what I have always really disliked about many web development frameworks. Their goal is to either a) do things magically in a specific way or b) do so with a bunch of configuration files. Spring comes to mind as a particularly egregious case that does both. Spring does things automatically, until you need to add a configuration file for every change. You need to add this wrapper and this library for this other case. I have always wanted a web development framework that works more like a game development framework. Where you still code everything you need but it doesn&amp;#x27;t hide the part where you make a window or add a listener. Which makes it a lot easier to find where things are going wrong and how to change the configuration as opposed to go to stack overflow and learn you need to add this dependency which then does things behind the scenes.</text></comment>