The Stupid Programmer Manifesto

I'm not smart enough for modern web development, and that's ok

Jun 15, 2023

I have a confession to make: I’m a terrible programmer. My productivity is quite low. I’m not 10x. I’m not even 1x.

To be able to produce anything, anything at all, I need to cut all the bullshit.

Bullshit code. Bullshit tools. Bullshit frameworks. Bullshit tech.

And after all that, I can barely approach being a 0.5x programmer.

I’m not smart enough to remember which objects have which fields, so I only use statically typed languages.

I’m not smart enough to figure out how to manage multiple repositories with shared code, so I put all my code in one repository.

I’m not smart enough to figure out how to make microservices work, so I just run my webapp as a monolith on a single server.

I’m not smart enough to figure out docker confiuration, so instead I compile my web application into a self contained statically linked binary executable file.

I’m not smart enough to figure out cloud services and auto scaling groups, so I just upload my static binary file using scp to a linux server I rent from a VPS provider.

I’m not smart enough to figure out how to setup all the databases and firewalls and load balancers, so I just embed the http server and data storage engine as libraries in my static binary.

I’m not smart enough to figure out SQL queries and object-relational-mapping between relational data and programming objects, so I just store my objects in their entirety as-is on disk.

I’m not smart enough to figure out all the REST and HTTP rules and verbs and best practices, so I just use “json over http” as a medium for a dead simple RPC: I always send POST requests. I put the function name in the url. I encode the parameters (and return values) as json data in the request (and response) body.

I’m not smart enough to figure out how to transform data between different layers of the system, so I just don’t. I use the same representation in the UI layer and the storage layer.