Keeping It Simple

We are often urged to keep code, design and architecture simple. What, however, is the motivation for this? And what does this mean in practice? Is simplicity just an aesthetic or does it also have social, economic and technical implications? Does simplicity reduce cost of change, of maintenance, of ownership? And when we say ‘simple’, is one person’s ‘simple’ necessarily the same as another person’s ‘simple’?

In this masterclass…

• We’ll consider simplicity from a number of viewpoints, including essential versus accidental complexity, value demand versus failure demand, simple versus simplistic.

• We’ll also look at typical sources of complexity in our coding habits, along with code examples in various languages.

• We'll see that many practices and approaches can be used both to simplify and to complicate. It's all in knowing how and when versus how not to and when not to use them. For example, we can encourage reuse through code libraries, platforms and services, but we can also make an architecture needlessly complex and draw in unnecessary dependencies, with implications for maintainability and security. Similarly, AI assistance can be employed to make code simpler and easier to work with but, without attention and guidance, it can make things harder in the long run, becoming a new source of legacy.

• We’ll explore verbose and convoluted code, the effect of programming paradigm and how we can turn down the imperative noise of many languages and styles with declarative techniques.

• We'll learn it’s not just in our programming and languages where we find complexity: our development processes, tools, architectures and organisational cultures can often encourage unnecessary complexity, costing us time, effort and opportunity where simplicity would have had the opposite effect.

• We’ll look at how we can work with incomplete knowledge without adding speculative complexity of so-called future proofing.

• We’ll acknowledge technical debt and neglect for what they are and understand why ‘legacy’ is so often the opposite of ‘simple’, no matter what its backstory. We want to make sure that as well as recognising unnecessary complexity in the small and the large, that we also have an idea of the practices that can help with simplification.

As well as presenting concepts, examining themes and considering code, this masterclass will also offer plenty of opportunity for questions and discussion.