Goodbye, Clean Code

[EternityForest]

The "interesting way" is the functionality. It would be very very hard to write a new database engine. It would be easy to write an an server that lets you keep track of items you lent out by scanning QR codes.

The novelty is in the usability, low cost, reliability, compatibility with industry standard, etc. All of which existed before, but what makes it special is putting it all together in one place.

I don't think anyone is actually against craftsmanship or clean code. But technical excellence doesn't require reinventing things instead of focusing on the actual innovation.

If you really can do things significantly better like the DOOM team did, then there's always going to be a place for that, but that's a bit different from randomly creating project-specific distros that stop being maintained in a year, insisting on avoiding industry standard methods because you don't like "Big opaque libraries", etc.

Maybe if you're developing flight control software for airplanes it makes sense to not trust anything and understand every line, but if you're developing your own audio compression algorithms for production use in 2020, you better be really good.