To sum up the first part of day 1 of GOTO Conference, I must say there’s a pattern in otherwise unrelated talks: simplicity.

“Programming is hard”, says Donald Knuth. It seems that the speakers all agree, we should stop making it even harder. We tend to, says Russell Miles. “We do it out of boredom”. He argues, that if the task at hand is boring, doesn’t inspire us or is simply just to simple, we tend to try and make it interesting, by making it more complicated. “Uh, I always wanted to look into python. Maybe and can solve the task using that”. And – oh – look and behold. Trouble down the road. But Russel also have a suggestion on how to avoid the complexty we tend to introduce our selfes. He call it O.R.E. – or Organize, Reduce and Encapsulate.

He argues that organizing is nothing more than identifying if a part of a module has to know about the outside world or not. If it does, it is integration, if it doesn’t it is core. Database access? Integration. Rest services? Integration. Business rule? Well, if all data is supplied by the integration parts, I guess it’s core.
He also argues, that integrations should be kept at a minimum af knowledge about the other parts to avoid entanglement. Just pass simple data documents and parse whatever you can understand. “Be liberal in what you accept”. By deciding that data should be immutable, he argues that this also helps in reducing complexity. He says, that to his experience, it will end up looking like functional programming and have a reduce complexity and entanglement. I’m already doing functional programming in clojure, so if it is true, that it ends up looking like functional programming, I would say that he is more or less correct in the rest of his arguments.

Simplicity also seems to be the keyword in the next talk with Mathias Meyer about Travis CI, a hosted,continous integration platform. In the talk, he tels the story about how they redesigned the system from a monolithic architecture to a scalable architecture, build from small, distributed parts. But more about that in a later post. Still have some digesting to do.