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Consistency: We developers love it don’t we?

We come up with beautiful architectures making sure everything is consistent. If we use a service in one place, we’ll use it everywhere. If we have a ViewModel for showing data, we’ll use a ViewModel everywhere, even if it’s not needed. Because we need to be consistent.

Partly I guess this is motivated because we think that being consistent helps ourselves and teammates understand what’s going on, even if that drives us to YAGNI and a series of WTF’s of why we did something that’s not required. We do it to be consistent!

It might seem inoffensive, but consistency can be damaging. It leads us into trying to homogenize everything despite it not being the appropriate approach in many cases.

So next time someone asks:

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…it’s cause we like to be consistent!

Breaking consistency when required not only lowers levels of WTF’s, it can even help scalability!