Isn’t the development community sort of there? I mean, most things are still run on PHP, and honestly, I recently saw an open source “forms for the public sector” thing build in Drupal, and now I’m wondering if we’ll ever need another custom programmed form for our web facing applications.
Yet if I go back to my non-management dev friends and talk about this, they are all like “eeeew, what about X and Y” and I’m just like, but neither the citizens or my IT operations staff gives two shits about any of that.
I’m not going to say what is right technically, because I’m not qualified to do that, but I do know what will happen as it’s my decision, and we’ll be slowly moving all our customs forms to a PHP CMS system and we’re just going to shoot the docket container it comes in directly out into our internal Azure cloud with public access through our national identity system (NemID). My developers aren’t going to be out of work either, but instead of making the same form with small differences 9000 times, they will be building Drupal modules with actual challenges.
> Yet if I go back to my non-management dev friends and talk about this, they are all like "eeeew, what about X and Y" and I'm just like, but neither the citizens or my IT operations staff gives two shits about any of that.
That's exactly what I meant. I remember arguing with a colleague who over-engineered a simple ORM table by having 3 classes. One was just an empty class, the other was an empty interface, and the third was the actual class. When I asked why did you make it this way? He said: "What if we decided to use Mongo later?
Technically he was right but practically, he was wrong! I saw this overthinking and over-engineering pattern across many in-house dev teams. But this is just my experience, and I'm not judging what is right and wrong from devs point of view. Every decision has its context, but I saw how these complications affecting the delivery and customer experience badly.
For some reason the first time I do something I always over engineer it... it took me a lot of self growth to take feedback like yours seriously and not get defensive of my “what-if” thought patterns.
I’ve gotten into the habit of just pumping out a naïve solution without worrying about anything and then throwing it away and re-building more thoughtfully because now I have full sense of the scope and some immediate edge-cases. As long as the thing is small enough to do that.
Yet if I go back to my non-management dev friends and talk about this, they are all like “eeeew, what about X and Y” and I’m just like, but neither the citizens or my IT operations staff gives two shits about any of that.
I’m not going to say what is right technically, because I’m not qualified to do that, but I do know what will happen as it’s my decision, and we’ll be slowly moving all our customs forms to a PHP CMS system and we’re just going to shoot the docket container it comes in directly out into our internal Azure cloud with public access through our national identity system (NemID). My developers aren’t going to be out of work either, but instead of making the same form with small differences 9000 times, they will be building Drupal modules with actual challenges.