Complexity is on the one hand something which can be measured by tools to give an objective value of how complex something is. However, this is not how I’ve come to see the word used in my work as a software developers. In this article I will talk about some of the aspects tucked away in the concept labeled complexity.
It tends to be used to cover up subjective opinions or believes getting portrayed as objective observations. Being able to detect when this happens is an essential skill to ensure you are able to no loose your confidence in your own abilities.

Fear of the unknown 👻

Image of a dark hallway with lights coming out from two open doors leaving two strips of light in the image.

Photo by Kamil Feczko on Unsplash

In my early days as a developer I worked as a contractor on a project for a client where we where hired to get a project over the finish line. They where facing a deadline and needed some people in to product. This was a Microsoft based architecture and it was in the years just after ASP.NET was released. Upon entering the project we learned about the guiding principles by the clients own architect. What we hear left us a bit puzzled as the way in which we where expected to go about coding components and pages went against everything we thought was right. Essentially we had to write our web application as if we where stilling concatenating strings in Perl, but in C# on the .Net platform. We where only two fairly young programmers from our company at the time, but we both thought this looked funny.

We tried to advocate for ASP.NET actually being a productivity enhancement and something which could help us reach the milestones with less effort. Especially since what we where making was a booking calendar solution, which would be ideal for the built in calendar components in ASP.NET. We tried to advocate this and show how it would make things easer, more robust and reduce our time to market. The architect was having none of it. Presenting reasons such as performance and complexity for reasons to keep the current pattern of development.

In reality it turned out to be fear of loosing control and fear of the unknown which lead us to having to implement a solution which was far from ideal and which ended up consisting of way more code than was needed. Writing the calendar booking component in a “Perl-style” was in an objective analysis far more complex and added may more code paths to the solution than the one we presented using the ASP.NET controls. What was diguised as something _too comple_x, was in reality something new and unknown for one individual.

More advanced does not always mean it is more complex

Knowing everything about all different software libraries and frameworks is really hard. Therefor it quite often happens that there are different levels of experience in a team. Developers who’s spent more time with a certain piece of software will know different patterns of how to solve certain things than the novice just learning it.
In cases like this the seasoned practitioner could be faced with their solutions being “too complex”. What the person uttering this often should have said is this: “I was not aware this was a way go about solving this problem. Could you please tell me more”. Figuring out how to best leverage a framework or library takes practice. Especially senior developers are quick to jump to the conclusion of something being “too complex” because they don’t understand something or lack the practice in this particular framework or library.
When encountering this, it’s important to outline how the statement of something being “too complex” is false, it’s just a matter of a more advanced usage of the software we use.

I remember being thought this lesson as a young developer with the attitude and failures of many other young developers: I knew it all. Luckily I had a patient teacher in Per Otto who had the patience and skills to learn me new things. Where I previously would just “hack together” some code, he introduced me to the Gang of Four patterns as a way to more elegantly solve some problems. What looked liked something needlessly complex for me without knowledge of them, turned out to be elegant ways to solve common problems with fewer chance of errors.

Not to my personal taste

Man appearing to be outside is licking on a deadly mushroom.

Photo by Anton Malanin on Unsplash

I have on a few occasions opted to use a framework called Hapi for writing HTTP based APIs in NodeJS. This is not the de-facto option which most developers use (which at the time of writing is Express), but it has some traits I personally really like. With few exceptions the choice of Hapi is always scrutinized by developers accustomed to Express, as they are developed with two totally different philosohpies. Where one is about freedom of choice and providing few opinions in how to do things (Express) and the other is all about making decisions and laying out a preferred path as to how to use the framework to get the most out of it (Hapi).

Being introduced to Hapi is always a bit of a hurdle as there are conventions and ways to do things you just have to accept. If you don’t you will only spend a lot of time fighting a fight you will loose in the end. Most developers opt to follow the path outlined by the author, while others choose to fight the premises on which the framework was authored on every single occasion.

The concept of plugins is central to Hapi and seasoned users of the framework tend to rely heavy on building their solutions as a series of plugins. This concept does not exist in Express and the introduction of writing a piece of domain specific code as a plugin is often met with utterances such as “it is too complex” or “this adds needless complexity to our app”. What I think they actually mean to say is that “this is an unfamiliar approach to solve this issue” and instead opt to solve the problem at hand in their usual manner instead of using the mechanisms built into the framework to solve these things.

What is deemed complex by someone not familiar with the framework, is viewed as an elegant and preferred way by those with more experience in the framework. Writing a Hapi plugin does require some more knowledge, but it follows the architectural patterns outlined by its author.

🎬 In closing

Be on the lookout for the word complexity being thrown around in technical discussions. Much like other powerful words such as performance and security, it is often used to disguise something else.

There are of course some solutions, frameworks and technologies which are more complex (Hello 👋🏼 container managed persistence with EJBs in the Java stack of early 2000s), so there are situations where the argument of something being too complex is appropriate.