I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time the past half decade across multiple companies working with very large, long running enterprise systems. Especially in long running, constantly changing systems, you want the code to be easy to understand, relatively painless to extend or modify, and when advantageous, be simple to modernize with updated technology. Unfortunately, the systems I’ve worked on have consistently failed to satisfy these goals.
Ironically enough though, my judgment is that the code in these systems has been hard to understand, extend or change, and modernize because they had all adopted much of the very industry conventional wisdom about how to build large, maintainable systems.
In particular, I want to demonstrate and explain why I think that prescriptive, layered architectural styles like Clean or Onion Architecture can actually cause harm in larger systems. I also want us to train our sights on how teams attempt to hide the actual persistence technol