Powerful Avoid Mini-frameworks

I work in Google Ads infrastructure in the past four years. Over time, I've seen one pattern came along again and again, causing endless pain for developers, that is, creating mini-frameworks.

First, I'd like to give readers a sense of what I mean by "mini-frameworks". Imagine a company that has 1000 engineers, and they share the same tech stack. Over time, a team finds the shared tech stack unsatisfactory, either because they have to write boilerplate code over and over, or the performance is not good enough, or whatever. So they decided to create their own framework on top of the shared stack. You know it's a framework and not just a library, when you hear engineers present the work using concepts they invented, as a way to actualize their mental model. Framework like this is what I called "mini-framework", with some common characteristics:

If you work for a big company, most likely you've seen or even done this. But why is it bad? Being a victim myself, I can share my story.

Over the years, my team has been using a Google-internal framework to write distributed programs, and are gradually migrating our org's codebase onto it. This framework is well-designed and maintained by a dedicated team. We're generally happy with it, though it has some itchy points (not pain points). Being a strong and ambitious engineer, my manager proposed that we add an abstraction layer on top of it, with the aim to lower the barrier for org adoption, and solve those itchy points on the way. I was skeptical and tried convincing my manager not to do it, but failed. Eventually, several engineers spent quarters to add this abstraction layer, and now the fun begins.

First, one author tried to adopt it in our existing codebase. People thought it would be easy, but it took like a year. Why? Because during the migration, they found that the abstraction cannot handle certain use cases, so they have to spend time patching it to make it work. In the meantime, other people like me were writing new code using the original framework, this again added new requirements and workload for migration. Eventually, after spending way more time than initially planned, the migration completed, and my manager decided that newly-written code should use our own framework.

Since I started writing code with the new framework, there wasn't a single time that I didn't want to curse and quit the job. The framework is so hard to use, it introduced so many concepts with the intent to hide complexity, but

Source: HackerNews