I’m interested in finding the patterns and architecture that prevents those mistakes. I think I’ve found it already.
And you've found a way to completely forestall the non-technical demands that force non-ideal design choices?
You're sitting on a gold mine friend.
I am sitting on a gold mine. But I can’t prove it. That’s the problem with this stuff. The industry moves horizontally with each design such that nobody knows if say the current design trend was better than the last. We go better or we go worse and nobody knows if it actually was.
Maybe I am sitting on a gold mine. The problem is you’d never know about it. You’d never believe it. Because a proof isn’t possible.
So because it’s not provable you have no clue about any design whether one is better or one is worse and thus you disbelieve everything.
The overall question is how do you create a design or pattern that has maximum adaptability to anticipate any possible requirement change with minimal rewrites? Where you only swap in and swap out modules without changing structure?
I think I found the best possible way. But you won’t believe me.
I have a solution for custom content management systems that usually makes it fairly easy for me to incorporate customer requests without needing to toss out my existing solution and start over. Almost a type of framework built over an existing open source CMS product. I maintain about 90 websites as the only backend developer, and have spent about 12 years now working through various versions of the software to custom tailor a solution that works for nearly all situations I have come across. I don't do front-end development any longer, but I was involved heavily at the beginning stages to make sure both the front-end and backend were flexible and broken apart into modules.
If you find a templates solution works for you then that is not a general solution. It’s better for you but you are hardening and becoming opinionated on certain details and that works for what you’re working on. My solution is a lower level pattern that is more general and less opinionated. For what you do it likely is only effective if you are required to drastically change an existing project while maintaining as much existing code as possible. The solution prevents a complete rewrite and allows you to modularly pull out what you don’t need and replace with the things you do need.
If you don’t need 90 percent of your project this pattern won’t prevent that. What this pattern allows is for you to actually pull out that 90 percent. Many projects that only need you to pull out say 30 to 40 percent of it actually end up with a full rewrite because the modules aren’t decoupled enough.
I do have something that explains my pattern and serves as support for it. But it's no proof because such a thing isn't really provable. Anyway it's easier to let AI explain it. In the following conversation I basically ask chatGPT about this topic with very general questions while manipulating it as little as possible.
https://chatgpt.com/share/67b3ca4b-fc5c-8001-a072-342357b8a6...
chatGPT basically arrives at the same pattern I discovered. Where I cheated is when I started giving my own opinions on the several patterns chatGPT suggests and I hinted the LLM at the direction I wanted to go. Everything else is a very general question.
That being said, there are clearly other sets of general questions that can very well lead chatGPT to form alternate conclusions, but this one aligns with what I and many others have discovered.
The point is I don’t want to argue about it with someone who doesn’t get it.