The WET Codebase

The Don’t Repeat Yourself Wikipedia article states:

Violations of DRY are typically referred to as WET solutions, which is commonly taken to stand for “write every time”, “write everything twice”, “we enjoy typing” or “waste everyone’s time”.

But as any Phish fan can tell you, wasting time is actually good!

A year ago, I gave a conference talk, and I want to share it today with those of you who haven’t watched it. This talk isn’t about React, or even JavaScript.

Watch: The Wet Codebase (includes transcript)

In this talk, my aim was to show why strict adherence to writing code that is free of duplication inevitably leads to software we can’t understand. While you could watch this talk by yourself, I tried to make it a good starting point for a team discussion. If you drop it in Slack, tell me what your teammates thought!

I hope you’ll enjoy watching this talk as much as I enjoyed presenting it. I would like to thank Gary and the team for organizing a stellar conference. I’m also thankful to Sebastian, Sandi, and Cheng for the talks that inspired this one.

I miss conferences. Hope to see you all soon.