software

We chose to define the frontend in one technology stack (Angular+TypeScript/JavaScript) and the backend in another (Ruby+Ruby on Rails), but both came together to fulfill a singular product vision.

A leaked snippet of the endpoint architectural design draft document, highly confidential.

Top level architecture

If you want to implement a form with a superb User Experience, you have to take care of many variables:

One of the primary tasks of engineers is to minimize complexity. JSX changes such a fundamental part (syntax and semantics of the language) that the complexity bubbles up to everything it touches. Pretty much every pipeline tool I've had to work with has become far more complex than necessary because of JSX. It affects AST parsers, it affects linters, it affects code coverage, it affects build systems. That tons and tons of additional code that I now need to wade through and mentally parse and ignore whenever I need to debug or want to contribute to a library that adds JSX support.

Eliminating needless classes frees up operating memory on the computer—and bandwidth in your head.

Your styles are scoped to the component. No more leakage, no more unpredictable cascade.

It's fashionable to dislike CSS. There are lots of reasons why that's the case, but it boils down to this: CSS is unpredictable. If you've never had the experience of tweaking a style rule and accidentally breaking some layout that you thought was completely unrelated — usually when you're trying to ship — then you're either new at this or you're a much better programmer than the rest of us.

It gets worse when you're working on a team. No-one dares touch styles authored by someone else, because it's often unclear what they're doing, what markup they apply to, and what disasters will unfold if you remove them. The consequence of all this is the append-only stylesheet. There's no way of knowing which code can safely be removed, so it's common to undo some existing style with another, more specific style — even on relatively small projects.

Data Model

For large-scale software systems, Van Roy believes we need to embrace a self-sufficient style of system design in which systems become self-configuring, healing, adapting, etc.. The system has components as first class entities (specified by closures), that can be manipulated through higher-order programming. Components communicate through message-passing. Named state and transactions support system configuration and maintenance. On top of this, the system itself should be designed as a set of interlocking feedback loops.