Discussion
@onepict ... better at embracing that mess.
It's a difficult thing to describe, and I feel like I'm all over the place in my attempt to put all those strands of thought into a coherent whole. But that's also OK, because a coherent whole becomes cathedralish.
So, the best I can suggest is to let your idea grow big and complex, but not try to architect it. Instead, try to imagine how the thing might move, where it gets pressure from. Then look at those areas, and try to arrive at the smallest...
@onepict ... possible nodes that can be resilient to such pressure. That don't absorb it, but distribute it evenly into the network, so that no node gets overwhelmed.
You need to arrive at rather simple individual parts, because complex parts become too difficult to predict.
Systems thinking considers this in terms of stocks, inflows and outflows. If stocks exceed thresholds, the inflows may be blocked. Outflows must be such that inflows can be managed. Each node becomes a kind of simple...
@onepict ... PID loop. It's how they're connected that makes the system work.
As a design principle, this is way too vague to be actionable, but I'm certain that this is the approach needed for building resilience. And it has the added side effect that every node doesn't have to be perfect. The whole doesn't have to be elegant.
That said, I also find that simplicity in individual parts is a good goal, and elegant in its own way.
Still not something you can throw at people in the same way...
@onepict ... you can throw DRY at them, or a similar catchy thing.
The only "Platonic Ideal" like thing I can come up with in computing is that way, way more things we build behave like a dynamic processing pipeline with MapReduce bits thrown in, and we probably should try to account for that earlier in development. I see a lot of software that is *almost* that, but then stops short, and as a result actually becomes *more* complicated rather than less.
But raise that, and a lot of folk...
@onepict ... will immediately say "why? Let's not overengineer stuff" and end up there anyway, but usually with having backed themselves into an incompatible corner.
🤷
I don't know that this helps.
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