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<< back -- written by Brent on June 02, 2023

Don't be clever

Ten years ago, I wrote the most beautiful, clever, over-engineered
piece of code ever. I was building a REST API for a startup, and
discovered lots of repetition between controllers: I was building the
same kind of actions and copying code over and over again. So I came
up with a solution: The CRUDController(tm).

It was a beautifully complex, abstract class that integrated with
Doctrine (the ORM that I was using back then). It had every possible
CRUD operation you could think of -- not just for entities, but also
for child- and has many relations; there were automatic overviews,
filtering, pagination, validation, data persistence, routing, and
whatnot.

And the only thing I had to do was to create a new controller, extend
from my amazing CRUDController(tm), provide an entity class, and be
done.

class TimesheetController extends CRUDController
{
    public function getEntity(): string
    {
        return Timesheet::class;
    }
}

Such a blast!

Except, of course: exceptions started to emerge. Not the programming
kind, but the business kind. Some controllers had to do some things a
little differently. It was small things at first: different URL
schemes, different kinds of validation; but soon, things grew more
and more complex: support for nested entities or complex filtering,
to name a few.

And young me? I just kept going. Adding the proverbial knobs and
pulls to my abstract class (which was growing into a set of classes
by now).

In the end, I created a monster; and -- ironically -- it had taken more
time than if I had simply copied code between controllers over and
over again. On top of that: I was leaving the startup, and no one
really understood how more than 50 controllers actually worked.

You might assume I understood, but let me be clear: I didn't really
know how much of it worked anymore.

Yes, I had failed to see the proper solution: a class generator -- so
that I didn't have to manually copy code again. It actually existed
back then, I simply didn't know about it, no one told me about it,
and I wasn't smart enough to question myself once I started going
down a certain path.

It's such a classic example, many of you probably recognise it. I
wouldn't say my coding skills were bad, by the way. No, I didn't
question myself enough, I lacked self-reflection and wasn't able to
critically look at my own ideas.

I wish I could show you The CRUDController(tm)'s source code; but I
don't have access to it anymore, unfortunately. Luckily, the memory
still exists. And it's a memory I remind myself of very often when
I'm going down the path of abstractions and complications. It's often
enough to hold me back and look for better solutions.

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