The Freak Parade

Have you ever had the experience while learning a new set of technologies in preparation for building a new system that, as your research begins to accumulate and the architecture you are searching for begins to take shape in your head, there remain a few places where your nascent mental framework is “hung up” on some piece of dogma you perceive in the subject matter? You feel intuitively there must be a better way but can’t get past some oft-repeated edict or tenet even though it is getting in the way of a truly elegant design.

This is usually only applicable when you’re new to some way of thinking because hands on experience allows you to brush away these hang-ups like spiders webs; when you have some experience in something you understand the reasons behind the dogma and can ignore it intelligently when appropriate. When you’ve just arrived on the scene you take much of what you are learning as gospel, and how could you do otherwise? Your feet aren’t damp yet, how dare you challenge existing wisdom?

If you’re very lucky then just at the right moment someone will come by and un-hook the string tethering your thought process and everything will fall into place. That, at any rate, is what just happened to me last night. If you aren’t so lucky, it may be enough to at least be aware that if you are studying something new and it just seems awkward or unnatural to you in the environment you have in mind then there is a good chance either the technology you are considering is a poor fit for your scenario or, more likely, you’re taking some piece of guidance too seriously or are misinterpreting some best practice, so ask for help!

For myself, I was relieved of just such a hang up in the wonderful world of messaging. I was under the misconception that because we had chosen an asynchronous, queue based messaging paradigm (nServiceBus) for our inter-service communication that we needed to keep all messaging activity in the system within that paradigm, even when the fit seemed just terrible. Udi Dahan was kind enough to post about that exact topic in his blog last night, setting a critical thought-balloon free and allowing a system design unnaturally warped by an arbitrary constraint to find its natural shape in my mind. Now we can use a nice, clean REST API to power the MVC front end of our application without me feeling filthy and guilty and dreading the moment when we’d have to pay the devil for the transgression. (Thanks Udi!)

Yet another case case of someone walking into my brain, moving a single dendrite from neuron A to neuron B, and suddenly the world is a simpler place. My advice: do not ignore or take for granted these million odd micro-revelations in your career or your life, and each subsequent revelation will come more easily and more frequently.