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First Principles Thinking In Software Development
Thinking is your defence against stupidity
“When you begin to think for yourself, the whole world changes and becomes much clearer.” — Edward O. Thorp
Developers need to reason from first principles because assumptions or letting other people think for you will often result in doing the wrong thing and wasted time.
I was trying to get the Microsoft Power Platform CLI to work to move a Power Portal from one environment to another. In theory, this copies the portal in a file and then you can import this into another with a few lines of PowerShell.
Except it wasn’t. I got an error saying the file was too big or the wrong file type. It was the end of the day. I was getting hassled for an update on progress. The progress is we are stuck with an error and we don’t know what the error means.
There were other environments where the portal had been imported, I looked at those environments to see the settings . There are two settings.
- Set the file size limit for attachments
- Set blocked file extension for attachments
The limits on the other Dynamics 365 environments were 5 megabytes, I looked at the blocked file extensions. I compared them to the environment I was using, and it had the same file extensions.
I asked another developer how they could import the portals, if the extensions were the same. He explained the tool they used removed the js filetype, imported the portal and then added back in the js filetype.
Error messages rarely tell you what exactly is wrong, they point you in the right direction. The error message was telling me there was an incorrect file type and instead of thinking it through, I used assumptions.
If I had thought what was happening, if I thought checked the file types that were importing, I could have worked this out.
Assumptions make developers look stupid
Assumptions are the own goals of software development
