2024-11-11 21:23 • 168 words

In the country where the red queen reigns supreme, you might encounter a dependecy that you cannot get rid of wholesale, need to update and which breaks its interface. Happens more often than anybody cares to admit.

I used to treat internal dependecies as, well, dependable. But experience taught me that a dependency which breaks once, usually will break again in the not too far away future. So to manage undependable dependecies you can create an anti-corruption layer and encapsulate all changes to the interface. As that comes at a cost and usually is only conforming to the initial upstream interface anyway, I tend to skip it the first time around, giving the dependency the benefit of the doubt. But when the interface turns out unstable it is "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice shame on me"; make sure that the fix also ensures that adapting the next time will be a matter of editing a single module under your own control.