alt Hacker NewsI work with a project that is heavily configuration-driven. It seems promising, but in reality:
- Configuration is massively duplicated, across repositories
- No one is willing to rip out redundancy, because comprehensive testing is not practical
- In order to understand the configuration, you have to read lots of code, again across multiple repositories (this in particular is a problem for LLM assistance, at least the way we currently use it)
I love the idea, but in practice it’s currently a nightmare. I think if we took a week we could clean things up a fair bit, but we don’t have a week (at least as far as management is concerned), and again, without full functional testing, it’s difficult to know when you’ve accidentally broken someone else’s subsystem
Now that I've returned to working on the project tonight, I just remembered another failing of our code. (I'm not in any way claiming these are universal problems, just that they are something to be wary of.)
Naming is so incredibly important. The wrong name for a configuration key can have cascading impacts, especially when there is "magic" involved, like stripping out or adding common prefixes to configuration values.
We have a concept called a "domain" which is treated as a magic value everywhere, such as adding a prefix or suffix. But domain isn't well-defined, and in different contexts it is used different ways, and figuring out what the impact is of choosing a domain string is typically a matter of trial and error.