It's Not the How, it's the What

By now, we all know the intentions are older than implementation. There were times when foolish software developers used to think the reverse was true, but thankfully today most of them have been browbeaten into aligning with the program.

So everyone seems to agree nowadays that articulating the what (i.e. the intention) is much more important than articulating the how (i.e. the implementation). So where's the problem then?

Web Development Challenges

While every prudent software developer had by now learned the lesson in separating the what from the how, they still seem to be applying it at too low a level. Similar to how the budding software developers of the olden days used to build those monstrous huge bloated monolithic programs that ended up being totally unwieldy and unmanageable, today's web developers are falling into the same trap of building similarly huge, bloated, unwieldy web sites.

Or, let me put the question up to you like this: what would you rather build -- a huge monolithic tightly coupled software program, or an open-ended set of smallish, self-contained, loosely coupled software units, that are easy to implement, easy to test, easy to troubleshoot and debug, easy to deploy?

Of course, if you are a software developer worth even a tiny bit of your own salt, you'd go for the latter. Some of us still recoil in horror when the flashbacks of bad old days of monstrous monolithic software programs come back to haunt us. Ugh, not a happy memory!

But it's really funny how these time honored principles of separation of labor, inversion of control, etc., do not seem to translate at all when being ported to the web development. Here, when developing web sites, budding software developers are more than happy to fall into the same old trap of indulging in muddling the concerns and seeking a single point of control. Which ends up in incredibly messy, monolithic, coupled and unmanageable web sites.

This, again, is the outcome of blindly rushing in to grab the how! How do I do such-and-such in Rails? How do I do such-and-such in Ajax?How do I do such-and-such in Flex? And on and on...

People never seem to stop to think what. What do I need to do in order to make this work? Forget about how to do something, and focus on the what.

How you do something is really not a big deal. 99 percent of the time it's just a short google search away. So why sweat the small stuff?

The what is much tougher. Google will not be able to help you there. You'd need your own cool head, your own common sense to figure that one out.

The surefire sign that you're charging down the wrong path is if you find yourself building large monolithic web sites. You know the ones that rely on the function calls, with one central point of control? The ones where it gets progressively difficult to introduce any new capability?

You know the ones I'm talking about. I bet you that right now you're working on one such site.

Well stop! Same as you wouldn't work on a single humongous big ass class, but would rather chop it up into dozens and dozens of smaller, more manageable classes, you must do the same with that web site. Abandon it. Chop it up. Give up the single point of control, give up the irresistible need to shoehorn everything through the single funnel of omniscient point of control.

Think back to your other software development skills. Remember how tough it was until you've learn how to properly delegate?

Well, now's the time to do the same delegating, only not with objects, but with web sites. Treat each web site as a single independent component, that specializes in offering some useful resources. Then open us the traffic gates. Let those independent, standalone 'components' interact, and see what happens.

See, I gave you the what; the how should be a piece of cake for you now.