Some thinking, trade-offs, theory building, and method-making one might ended up doing, in the course of bringing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) discipline to brownfield (and greenfield) services, at a small regulated fintech company, having a smaller engineering team that serves several business units, including one of India's largest national tax gateways. Only somewhat easier than reading a long compound sentence without pausing for breath. Phew.
In a land bereft of a canonical "killer app" web framework or two, one must think about the what, why, how, where of all the moving parts. Out here, one must become a student of web framework architecture in addition to web application architecture. For here, in Clojure-land, the two are one. ☯
In a world of concrete objects, steel frameworks bring sense and order. In a forest of composable tools, libraries and open-ended schemas, it would be the mycelia. A frustrated yet optimistic man muses "Might such a thing come to be?".
Here I illustrate how Clojurists (including Yours Truly) like to solve problems and model things using hammocks, pure functions, and the "it's just data" ideology. Also, while the *problem* focuses on "design in the small" of application logic, many ideas in the *solution* can—and do—scale all the way to "design in the large" of whole systems.
Or, the one in which we hand-craft nano Unix tools using Bash functions.
Or, the one in which we "take apart" Douglas McIlroy's pipeline from 1986. Doing so teaches an object lesson about the essence of modular, composable, functional architecture.
Or, *Supremely Functional Bash Programming*, an exploration in N parts...
In which we ponder the Functional Nature of Life, The Universe, and Everything. Please feel free to follow through the weeds, or jump straight to the bottom for my 2 nano BTC on the matter. (Or my current state of mind, at any rate.)
I've long struggled with the *Technical* Debt metaphor. It was immediately useful when I first heard it. I still think it is useful, albeit as a starting point. The more I worked with software, the more infuriatingly incomplete it started to feel. So I've reframed it as *Software* Debt, for myself. Here's what I'm thinking.