Over-Engineering

Over-engineering has started to become a pet peeve of mine. Sometime I feel like my thoughts on architecture follow a pendulum. It goes from the extreme of abstracting like crazy and applying design patterns out the ass, to the other extreme of not thinking about generalizing at all. Eventually, I hope to settle down at a reasonable point in the middle. Give me a few years.

I think our current DB schema is a little over-engineered. Granted, we wanted to challenge ourselves to do something new with the project, but it ended up costing us a good deal in development time. Not so cool with OS in the way. In "real life", we would have saved time in the long run, since the project would probably to stay around for 5 years. The time used to set up our architecture would have made up by speeding up all those years of future development. Unfortunately, our application has the lifetime of a month.

I think that a good rule of thumb is to write the simplest code possible, without coding yourself into a corner.

Do you need to unit test that class? No? Then don't make it an interface. Changing this later isn't hard, but working with a system where every single class is an implementation of an interface is harder. Adding unneeded complexity to your code will just make your system more error prone.

Do you really need to every function to be less than 10 lines? Well is it hard to understand your code? No? Then don't bother. Reading through a file with hundreds of three line functions is a nightmare. It's really cool when you can read the high level function as if it were pseudo code, but understanding how everything works becomes much more complex. And again, complexity will lead to more error prone code.

Do you really need to make that Singleton thread safe? No? Then why would you? It's trivial to make that change later, when you actually need it.

With that said, it's important that you don't code yourself into a corner. You shouldn't make a system that's hard to extend. It should be easy to extend when the need arises. Until then, leave it alone.