Some teams produce what I call a festering code base. In a festering code base, the team changes the code primarily by adding code to existing methods and adding methods to existing classes. The results are predictable. Classes and methods grow malignantly, eventually becoming thousands of lines long.

Better teams produce budding code bases. Developers create new classes and methods and delegate work outward. Periodically, they collapse structure back into a simpler form, but the dominant trend is to grow the code by creating new structure.

I’d never put much thought into how code bases grow in the past. Feathers has some interesting ideas here about the characteristics of good and not-so-good growth and how languages and tools might promote good growth.

Lately, I’m starting to see more and more teams implement that sort of functionality. Rick Olson describes how GitHub implements it in How we deploy new features, and includes links to how Forrst and Flickr do it as well. At Velocity, Paul Hammond explained how to build an application-specific kind of version control into your app.

I’m a little surprised that few libraries have emerged for managing this. It would seem that, given all the excitement about continuous deployment, automated rollbacks, and incremental rollouts, someone would come up with something that they think is neat enough to share. I suspect that in fact, this is a really ugly, deeply application-specific sort of thing, no one likes to look at how they do it, and that’s why there is plenty of talk about how to do it, but no libraries making it a simple thing.

(Editor’s note: I recently took to using Tumblr again. For a while, I’ve been curating interesting stuff here. But Tumblr has evolved into a really fantastic application for doing this. So, my policy going forward is to post my stuff here and curate other people’s awesome stuff over there. That said, I’ll probably do “best-of” posts, like this one, to keep you interested and informed.)

I’ll just sit here and quietly hope that the plans for an urban park around the Trinity aren’t derailed by everything that is politics.

Try something. Every time somebody complains about the evils or failings of “the government,” strike out “the government” and see what results.

Often, simply striking out “government” reveals a completely different, and far more useful, commentary.

I think that many of the NoSQL crowd either fail to either recognize, or to properly describe that their preferred databases don’t replace applications like MySQL and Postgres, just as Ruby doesn’t replace Java. Instead, the explosion of these new options for persistence just work better for some domains (and worse for others).

Ben Scofield’s spot-on here. One of the many transitions we’re undergoing is from “I’ll use MySQL most of my career” to “I’ll tinker with a different database for every project over a couple years and then pick and choose the best as time goes on”.