Telling a Tale of a Different Kind of Keyboard

Practical Microservices — by Ethan Garofolo (4 / 166)

👈 Introduction | TOC | What This Book Is 👉

So let’s digress into a story about something that at once is what many adults wish to have spent more time practicing and what children often dread: the piano. I never really learned the piano, but I did learn one song well enough that I was asked to play it in a church group. The song is called “A Poor Wayfaring Man of Grief,” and really liking it, I figured I needed to know how to play it. I can look at a staff and figure out what the notes are, but I can’t do that fast enough to read the music and press the corresponding keys in real time.

So I set about memorizing the song. One. Beat. At. A. Time.

I put my fingers for both hands in place for the first beat and played it, removed my fingers from the keys, and then without looking at the music put them back and played that first set of notes. Then I read the second set and basically played a game of Simon[1] until I had memorized the song.

And I did. I could reproduce the notes. But woe was me when I made mistakes halfway through the song! It was a bit like typing a password. When you goof on entering a password, you generally have to start over.

One day a friend of mine offered to teach me piano properly. We sat down, and she observed my playing. She was gracious in how she let me know, “If you’re ever going to play this instrument, you’re going to have to unlearn a lot of things.”

There’s a technique to piano. For example, if you’re walking your left hand up the keys, you’ll play notes from your pinky to your thumb. When it’s time to go to higher notes, your middle finger slides over to the right of your thumb, and it makes for an elegant trip up to the higher pitches. As an understatement, I did not discover this technique when I was memorizing that song. Folks who do learn good technique can work an amazing art.[2] What these other folks do is closed to me until I pay the price of unlearning.

Learning microservices-based architecture was and continues to be a similar process of unlearning. You’re likely skilled in Model-View-Controller (MVC) frameworks that model systems in terms of Create-Read-Update-Delete (CRUD) operations. Maybe you’ve used frameworks like Ruby on Rails or Django.

But you keep running into a productivity wall. It becomes extremely difficult to add features and fix bugs. You’ve changed frameworks and you’ve changed languages. Is every project fated to hit this point where every enhancement is excruciating?

The answer to that question is a resounding “NO!”

👈 Introduction | TOC | What This Book Is 👉

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