this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2023
27 points (100.0% liked)

Experienced Devs

3961 readers
1 users here now

A community for discussion amongst professional software developers.

Posts should be relevant to those well into their careers.

For those looking to break into the industry, are hustling for their first job, or have just started their career and are looking for advice, check out:

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
snowe@programming.dev
jmk1ng@programming.dev
drewsiferr@programming.dev
27
How do you balance rapid iteration and merging/upgrading? (programming.dev)
submitted 1 year ago by tatterdemalion@programming.dev to c/experienced_devs@programming.dev
24 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

More specifically, I'm thinking about two different modes of development for a library (private to the company) that's already relied upon by other libraries and applications:

  1. Rapidly develop the library "in isolation" without being slowed down by keeping all of the users in sync. This causes more divergence and merge effort the longer you wait to upgrade users.
  2. Make all changes in lock-step with users, keeping everyone in sync for every change that is made. This will be slower and might result in wasted work if experimental changes are not successful.

As a side note: I believe these approaches are similar in spirit to the continuum of microservices vs monoliths.

Speaking from recent experience, I feel like I'm repeatedly finding that users of my library have built towers upon obsolete APIs, because there have been multiple phases of experimentation that necessitated large changes. So with each change, large amounts of code need to be rewritten.

I still think that approach #1 was justified during the early stages of the project, since I wanted to identify all of the design problems as quickly as possible through iteration. But as the API is getting closer to stabilization, I think I need to switch to mode #2.

How do you know when is the right time to switch? Are there any good strategies for avoiding painful upgrades?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] itsybitesyspider@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago

I like library providers that can provide mechanical upgrade instructions. For example:

model.adjust(x,1,y) is now model.single(Adjustment.Foo, x).with_attribute(y)

Or whatever. Then people can go through your instructions find-and-replacing the changes, or even better, have an automated tool do it.

Also you pay some of the maintenance burden by writing all this documentation, so you have a some stake in keeping the changes minimal.