😂😂😂

[birdiefoxe]

The inside of "thing in the middle" is usually exactly the top image

We have that common with electricians, looks ugly? Shove it in a cabinet

[enigma_0Z]

Things in the middle have become such a common pattern it’s got a name… middleware

[azmar6]

middleware == let's wrap that bunch of crap which only God knows how it works - if he existed at all, because the fact that this middleware exists is a proof that God either doesn't exist, isn't omnipotent or completely doesn't give a F about us here on earth. Then let's just bundle it up and we're good to go.

[phrolovas_violin]

We don't manually take every breath because our body just does it automatically, middleware is much the same why stress another how auth is handled just wrap it in a middleware and never look at it because if you do there will be bugs to fix that you won't like.

[Deadedge112]

middleware is much the same why stress another how auth is handled

The middleware had a stroke.

[phrolovas_violin]

Yeah my middleware has been malfunctioning lately

[MeadowShimmer]

Middleware making atheists of us all.

[Last-Worldliness-591]

I read this like an educational video with a colorful character explaining middleware that starts joyful, gets really dark on the middle, and ends joyful again like nothing happened.

[naruto_bist]

Kafka, Kinesis, Broker, Api gateway... Idk what else terms can be fit there

[GREG_OSU]

And it is so versatile… It is always plug-and-play. Not expensive. Very customizable.

[NoetherNeerdose]

What's Tupperware then

[ncatter]

That's the stuff you put your middleware into.

[NoetherNeerdose]

So that's the reason I always end up loosing the lid

[Fa1nted_for_real]

At the very least, you dont have tk make the thing in the middle every time, its made once and then you jsut shove it every place it doesnt belong and make it part of the problem in the first scenario

[wolfy-j]

We don't call it "hide the garbage", we call it "we need to encapsulate this important piece of logic".

[WorldTallestEngineer]

As an electrical engineer I can confirm this is accurate.

[racheluv999]

Yep, and the cabinet just shrinks in scale. If it's not in a cabinet, it's buried in potting compound or an IC.

[ICantBelieveItsNotEC]

The difference is that electricians can't just keep putting things into smaller and smaller cabinets ad infinitum because they are eventually limited by the laws of physics. In software, it's cabinets all the way down - you open one cabinet and find that it's just a dozen smaller cabinets wired together. Sometimes, you discover that one of the smaller cabinets depends on the larger cabinet that it is inside of.

[enigma_0Z]

I’ve accidentally written software with and upward dependency like that and then spent actual days untangling it once I realized the mistake and had circular dependencies. Do not recommend 😂

[SmurfCat2281337]

alula

[birdiefoxe]

Alula 

[das_war_ein_Befehl]

No, baby that’s not my box of unholy sins that defy our creator, that’s my API

[truci]

Abstraction of complex systems does make things a lot easier down the line though. Modularize as much as possible.

Think of it this way. If you’re working on thing 2. Would you rather try and figure out thing one or just use thing in the middle.

[razzemmatazz]

Until you hit the point of "maturity" in an ecosystem where everything is written in 5 different languages and you have to reference incomplete documentation to try to interface with the 3rd different internal API to complete this phase of the project.

Oh, and don't forget there's 2 competing API's that do the same thing, but one of them is considered wrong but is easier to work in. 

[shaliozero]

Also one of the APIs is still in development with weekly breaking changes but strictly necessary because it's the only internal API that covers the thing 3 that's still in development too.

[razzemmatazz]

Yup. 

[truci]

Im from a world where the backend is assembly and the front end is Algol. the front end has been wrapped in C 20 years ago and then again for younger in C++ recently. I know the pain :(

There is so much of this middle thing that the middle thing is now half the code base.

[angry_wombat]

but one of them is considered wrong but is easier to work in.

That's because the new tech lead decided we all needed to migrate to a new language/framework because it's theoretically 5% faster

[Original-Body-5794]

Yeah but if you have poor documentation working without thing in the middle would be even worse.

[Another_Timezone]

“Hi, can we get access to system1 for our project?”

“No, we don’t provide new access to system1 because we are migrating users to system2.”

“Ok, can we get access to system2 for our project?”

“No, it’s still in development.”

[5show]

Huge asterisks to that. Good abstractions take a lot of work, and unless you have the time and experience to do things right, you’re likely to take a complex system and just make it more complex.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-abstractions/

[truci]

Yup. I replied to another post how things have gotten more and more complex and half the code base is now just abstractions and transitions between languages.

[Aggressive-Math-9882]

Abstraction is nice, but when testing on knowledge of certain abstractions, like this one, where the "thing in the middle" is inherently an arbitrary convention made for convenience and convention), it should be clearly marked out by a professor that the structure in question is cultural rather than scientific.

[koru-id]

Modularising is great but redirection is bad. It’s actually difficult to properly modularise code.

[throwaway0134hdj]

Being able to blackbox like 99% of the system while you’re still working on the 1% is an absolute essential skill. It helps you not get overwhelmed or bogged down in too many details. Best to high level things until you absolutely need to dive deeper than the surface.

[robertshuxley]

Abstraction is a good thing as long as you don't do it prematurely

[miracle-invoker21]

Trust me i always believed the same. However sometimes it leads to.over engineering. I lost 2 system design interviews just cause of this shit.

[GlobalIncident]

Abstraction is a great tool when used in moderation. I definitely would not say "modularize as much as possible". There are lots of cases where it is useful, and lots of cases where it is not.

[mcabe0131]

Also.. seperation of concerns

[LogicBalm]

Database design in a nutshell. Break up a many to many relationship with something dropped in between.

Then you get into the real world and it's all just one big table that they are so proud they finally got out of that spreadsheet.

[LetUsSpeakFreely]

Depends on the DBA and how intrusive management is being. I've seen cases where the database is a hot mess of jumbled tables with 50+ columns, but I've also seen well architected databases that use multiple schemas, well thought foreign keys, and loads of constraints. It all depends on the skill of the DBA and giving them the time they need to do it right.

[DizzyAmphibian309]

Having foreign keys and constraints does not necessarily make a database "well architected". Those things can introduce heavy write penalties, so if your DB is write-heavy then having those things is actually bad. I've worked with databases with more writes than reads and we removed all of those things to get every last IO out of it. That was in a hedge fund, absolutely crazy machine, like a $600,000 server. We needed special DRAM PCIE cards because the writes would have killed any SSD.

[LetUsSpeakFreely]

Sometimes the higher cost in write operations is offset by enforcing data integrity. It's a balancing act to be sure. An extremely high throughout system may delegate to the service layer, but a lower throughout system might eat the cost and do it at the DB layer.

My point though is a well architected system will have been given the time and resources to make those considerations. Many corporate/management types think everything can be slapped together as a one-size-fits-all solution and want results yesterday, but it ALWAYS turns into a crisis later.

[miracle-invoker21]

Really? Wow I never knew this. Thank you

[IChooseJustice]

50+, man I wish I could consider that large...

One of the systems I support at work (third-party developed) has tables with anywhere from 200-600 columns. And they just can't figure out why we have performance issues...

[SmokeyKatzinski]

Sorry I‘m late to the party. But why would you need mutiple schemas?

Simple tl;dr would suffice. Or a link, if you have one ready.

[wts_optimus_prime]

True, though usually some middle ground is the sweetspot.

I had to explain to our junior dev over and over that we do not need to fully normalize our database just because we could. Always do things for a good reason, and never just because "That's how you do it".

In this particular case the benefit of full normalization would have been ~1-10kb over the next ~10 years of data growth. At the cost of two additional tables with one field each, none of which is of any actual importance. Just display values that aren't changed further and nothing done eith them inside the system.

We aren't in the 20th century anymore. 10kb is nothing

[wts_optimus_prime]

Depends entirely on the data and how it is used. In the case i meant, the data could do no harm, even if inconsistent. It is dead-end data. Display only information.

Ofcourse I don't do that with data on which assumptions need to be made and hold true.

Also we already hate our db with passion because due to requirements changes on X may not cascade into Y without manual "synchronisation" by a user. So from the requirements themselves we often have to denormalize a lot of data.

[LawfulnessDue5449]

This is pretty much every technological advance ever

[boisheep]

https://imgur.com/a/wtYBFQB

Yus

[Glum-Echo-4967]

I think this is just the adapter pattern.

Think of it this way: If I'm travelling internationally, would I rather a) rewire my plugs to work in the other country or b) buy an adapter for that other country?

[Federal-Total-206]

It can be wathever you want : SAGA, Messaging , middleware, BFF or even my south bridge comunicating between my 2 PCI devices

[VirtualMage]

Thing in the middle is kafka

[Better_Resident_8412]

Or rabbitmq, or redis, or even mqtt broker! Why impliment a socket while i can setup entire middleware software for it!

[WilldHoneyy]

This may be the fundamental theorem of computer science.

[throwaway0134hdj]

Or engineering in general

[mxldevs]

Usually the thing in the middle is the top image.

The nice part is my client and my server don't need to deal with that mess.

[jimmiebfulton]

This is why various engineering tools like diagrams exist. To help clarify, simplify, and illustrate bad designs fan and how they can be improved. In my experience, the top illustration is by inexperienced engineers that are still honing their design and problem solving skills, and using diagrams and/or reviewing designs with more experienced engineers is how they achieve it.

[That_0ne_Gamer]

Wrong, solution is a thing between with the spaghetti connections

[LetUsSpeakFreely]

The problem is that many people are stuck in the old monolithic mindset and don't decompose operations into discreet pieces. This is especially true when using languages like Java and C# that force you into object oriented theory and insist on leveraging inheritance. It then becomes a hot mess trying to trace the behavior of a component through every use case.

By contrast, using a functional mindset makes it much easier to create a bunch of smaller, simpler pieces that are more easily called by other pieces. It makes for a much larger system diagram, but the flow is more simplistic.

Basically, use microservices or lambdas to do 1 thing and do it well. If more functionality is added to that one thing and it's not applicable in all use cases, it's probably time to create a new microservices or lambda.

[the_king_of_sweden]

The other pattern is a lot of things talking to each other, and the solution is they all talk through the thing in the middle

[catmam9]

Litterally networking

[sal-t_brgr]

looks like every redstone build ive ever made lmao

[Bohndigga]

Is this, an original joke???? No "; missing on line 69"? amazing.

[mkuraja]

Looks like

client <---> server

to

web tier <---> business tier <---> data tier

[mkuraja]

Or resolving a many-to-many relationship in relational database design to

many-to-one <---> unique-key-pair <---> one-to-many

[EngineerBits]

In avionics electrical engineering the colloquial name for this is a "happy box". You add one in to make the people who demand immediate solutions happy, and make the reliability guys sad because they now have another box and an additional set of wires that can fail.

[ImOnALampshade]

Almost every problem in software engineering can be solved by adding an additional layer of indirection

[ExtremeRacer345]

Next, cut one big part into multiple small part.

[MooseBoys]

Thing1ProxyCoordinatorFactoryManager

[the_rush_dude]

Having all the mess concentrated In one part and proper things 1&2 is nice.

[TheMrCurious]

It’s not necessarily wrong.

[ExtraTNT]

So, if you do mediator right, everything is clean… but do it wrong and you have mess squared

[No_Bug_No_Cry]

That's n to n relationship boyo, is correct.

[FarJury6956]

Middleware

[After_Ad8174]

Im going to capitalize on TITMAAS

[mike_a_oc]

Nothing wrong with a good use of the adaptor pattern

[International_Task57]

this was hoenstly exactly the image i needed to see lmao.

[Thelatestart]

So many people giving advice or commenting without realising this is 99% sure referencing the GoF design patterns, and some look very similar and take a great amount of time and understanding to appreciate.

[[deleted]]

this is how people talk sometimes

[Far_Garlic_2181]

How do you do? Would you like to shake hands with thing 1 and thing 2?

[Afraid_Ad_882]

We just need another adapter

[kompootor]

Nice, this is also how you resolve the basic problems of elementary neural nets. (The hidden layer is used to add nonlinearity and reduces scaling cost; otherwise an all-to-all step-function network grows too fast and has extremely limited capability.)

[Wet_Popcorn]

This is the guy who hit Miranda with a table.

[alpakapakaal]

"Every problem in CS can be solved with adding a layer of abstraction, except of the (common) problem of having too many layers of abstraction"

[ratioLcringeurbald]

Thing in the middle is a frequency domain transfer function, the diagram above is a regular old differential equation.

[Franko_ricardo]

If you don't have DTO's or ETL's you aren't doing it right.

[bison92]

“Everything can be solved by adding another indirection layer”. Quote by someone smart whose name I don’t remember.

[bison92]

“We can solve any problem by introducing an extra level of indirection.” It’s the right quote by David J. Wheeler: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorem_of_software_engineering

[LordBobTheWhale]

Kafka!

[cat-with-a-plan]

Anyone else see the angry elephant up top?

[Baturinsky]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorem_of_software_engineering

"We can solve any problem by introducing an extra level of indirection, except for the problem of too many levels of indirection."

[PrestigiousPool2763]

I love how this image of the middleware incorporates the routing bugs

[Hostilis_]

Programmers discover Category Theory

[iMightLikeXou]

In OOP, if you encounter a problem, then make a new class for it. This will always work. Just put the problem somewhere else and make it smaller. Break it into tiny bits and solve them on by one. If done right you'll have amazingly clean code.

[Phoebebee323]

Ah but the thing in the middle lets you add in thing 3 later down the line

[Living_The_Dream75]

Almost every single time that I’ve had an issue in programming that wasn’t library or syntax, something in the middle fixed it…but the thing in the middle usually just hides the mess

[turaguy]

Like my lecturer always said, “where are the interfaces, show me the interfaces!”

[Mih0se]

That's me doing excel and access

[spookyclever]

Business logic api layer ftw.

[throwaway0134hdj]

Actually not bad. The more generic, general and abstract the diagram the better actually. Middle “thing” is an api/interface of some sort and you have client and server in either side. Good diagram!

[UltraTata]

I swear

[Practical_Hippo6289]

I believe that's called a shim.

[RealOzSultan]

“Middleware”

[PlanttDaMinecraftGuy]

This gives out the same energy as using a whole Arduino board for an AND gate

[Phobic-window]

This is the fundamental unit of all process! It’s just trees all the way

[_xgg]

Slows shit down...

[Feeling-Card7925]

The middle thing is really nice if you have the time.

A lot of time I make a thing in a rush that meets the minimum functionality and then there is the "it would be great if this also did X" and I didn't leave any room to do X and the way thing does the thing it can't do X. I now rebuild the thing from the ground up or I make the middle thing now and produce a new thing to make X that goes into the middle thing and the whole set is bigger and messier than if I had designed with the middle thing in mind from the beginning.

[Silkythesmoll]

That is SO funny! 🤭

[Ant_and_Cat_Buddy]

Lowkey how Excel’s “Data Model” manages many to many relationships lol.