I think the 3 points are decent guidance in general but I feel you probably should have included some examples of when it doesn’t make sense to follow them. Like everything in life, the actual realization of something is more complicated and we should provide guidance that speaks to nuances that might affect design/implementation decisions. It’s something I think we lost (or the loss accelerated) within the last 15-20 years. Now everything is “you have to do this or you’re terrible at programming” and the nuances are lost as the entire thing is framed in a way to try to grab attention/views. I don’t mean to imply you’re doing that here, just a general observation that articles and videos on programming rarely include more nuanced things.
Anyways, I agree with the overall content of the post but felt I’d provide some counter examples for each point. Admittedly they may not be the best but calling out something like them I think would be worth doing so readers have a wider view of the topic and can make more informed decisions.
Point 1: This is great general advice; be consistent with your names. However, it’s simply not feasible in certain situations. Are you building a data access library? You’re going to need dynamically named things. Maybe your system has thousands of tables (yes it happens, the real world is messy). I would much rather work on a system that uses dynamic names which enforces naming consistency than deal with some switch statement covering hundreds/thousands of things. Not only would the code be cleaner and easier to deal with that way but it would have the added benefit of running everything through the same naming logic and therefore helping with name consistencies.
Point 2: Name consistency is important (see end of above) but don’t force it when it doesn’t make sense. If you have two distinct systems/services that each operate in different domains but share some underlying data source. Maybe the enrollment service calls something an enrollment but the billing system calls it a line item. The freedom to name things appropriately for how they’re used is important and should be another tool in your belt. It also helps business users/managers/etc… and programmers have a shared understanding of domain terminology/requirements/etc…
Point 3: I’d agree for the most part and this is generally great advice. Sometimes it makes sense to go hierarchical. For example human readable configs can benefit from hierarchical structures since we like to process information by grouping things. I’d rather just have a json or yaml section called DataSources than have to repeat the “datasources.datasource1.name”, “datasources.datasource2.name” and so forth for every single datasource defined in the config.
I think the points you made are great. We should use them when appropriate though and knowing when it’s appropriate or not is something we should try to teach along with the rules themselves.
This person obviously has their own way of doing things that works for them and that’s great. Some of his views are patently absurd though. This is mostly commenting on his reasons against using a forge and not a comment that he should do something differently.
100% fair and I think this is the main take-away from the blog post. If you don’t trust something, don’t use it. Full stop, the post could have ended there and been fine. But then it goes on to say:
You mean like forcing people to use email to submit pull requests to your self-hosted git repos? It doesn’t matter what you are doing, if you are working on an open source project you are going to have workflow limitations. This is arguing a fallacy.
Nothing is forcing you to use these features so just don’t use them. Plenty of teams use 3rd party tools but host their code in a forge site. Having options available to you automatically is not the same thing as being forced to use them. If it was, JIRA wouldn’t exist because everyone would use github/gitlab/whatever’s built-in issue tracking and project management.
The majority of the post comes across as someone who just doesn’t like the forge sites and aside from the trust aspect, then spent a bunch of effort trying to create associations and limitations between things that don’t exist.
Trust is 100% the main reason not to use a forge site and all the other things cited are superfluous and/or very subjective.