As a developer it seems, you always seem to strive towards producing ever more complicated code. Utilizing new frameworks, adopting an ever evolving “convention before configuration”, pushing object-oriented programming - maybe Domain Driven Development - are practices introduced, refined and explored in the quest to prove yourself as a steadily better developer with rising skills.

Yet to what point?

While the intricate complications may impress fellow developers, doing so often digs a hole which may be pretty hard to get out of. Every complication - not matter if it is in the design, the architecture or the structure of the code - often provides the opposite effect of the desired outcome. The whims of your current self to impress developers with the latest fashionable technique, is short termed reward for a long term pain.

Running a modern IT platform is rarely an easy nor isolated task. Most platforms consist of a fairly large number of components ranging from OS level to 3. party libraries and components added in the user interfacing layers - and adding numerous integrations does make it an interesting challenge to quickly identify and correct bugs and errors.

While the system complexity does pose a challenge is surely not an impossible task, as several tools exists for most - if not all - platforms to allow instrumentation of the platform and utilize the instrumentation tools to handle the platform and identify issues quickly.

Most IT departments have the best intentions of providing the best quality, coherent solutions, yet market conditions, projects running in parallel and various constraints on budgets, resources or time, often causes what might be defined as Accidental Architecture.

The easiest way to identify cases where you’ve been hit by accidental architecture is when describing your it architecture and look for the works “except” or “but not”. Typical examples include - we have a single-sign system utilized everywhere except…”, “We update all systems to current versions, but not this old system…”.

It seems to be quite popular to move away from custom build IT solutions to so called COTS - commercial of the shelf solutions. The idea being, that to software solution fulfil a functionality which long has been commoditized and standardized to such an extent that it offers no “competitive edge” nor core value to the business.

For most companies and organizations the office suite would be a pretty safe bet for a piece of software which is magnificently suited for a COTS solution. Finding someone who develops an internal word processor in-house seems crazy as so many fully capable solutions exists in the market.

Google has come up with a nice new image format called webp. Currently support for this format is fairly limited, so if you need to use webp images else where it might be nice to convert them to a more widely supported format. To do the conversion, Google has made a small tool available called dwebp. The tool however does only seem to support conversion of a single image, not a batch of images.