So, I recently spent some time trying out this ‘Andy Gibson’ approach I stumbled upon. Wasn’t really sure what to expect, just heard bits and pieces, you know, about keeping things straightforward in coding.
Getting Started with the Idea
First thing I did was try to actually pin down what this ‘Andy Gibson style’ was all about. There wasn’t a big manual or anything, more like scattered notes and ideas I gathered. The main vibe seemed to be extreme simplicity. Like, really dialing back on abstractions and frameworks that we usually lean on.
I decided to test it on a little side project I was kicking off. Nothing critical, just a small tool for myself. Figured it was a safe space to experiment without messing anything important up.
Diving In: The Actual Process
Alright, so I started coding. My instinct was, as usual, to set up layers. You know, define interfaces, maybe a service layer, think about dependency injection. But I consciously stopped myself. No layers this time. I just wrote the functions I needed, often right where I called them or in the same file.
It felt really strange, almost wrong. Like I was skipping important steps. My brain kept yelling, “This won’t scale! This is messy!”
- I put database logic pretty close to the request handling.
- Instead of complex objects, I used simple dictionaries or basic data structures a lot.
- When I felt the urge to create an abstraction, I paused and asked, “Do I absolutely need this right now?” Mostly, the answer was no, following the Gibson spirit.
I spent less time configuring things and more time just… writing the core logic. It was faster to get something working, that’s for sure. But I also spent moments staring at the code thinking, “Is this too simple? Am I being naive?”
What Came Out of It
So, what was the end result? The codebase was definitely smaller. Significantly fewer files and lines of code compared to how I’d normally build even a small tool like this. Reading the code was very direct – you could see the flow pretty easily without jumping through hoops.
But, and it’s a big ‘but’, I do have worries. Maintainability feels questionable. Without clear boundaries, I suspect changing one part might easily break another, especially if the project grew. It feels a bit brittle. Fine for a one-person quick tool, maybe less so for a team or a long-term project.
Why Bother Though?
You might ask why I even went down this path. Honestly? I got really fed up at my previous gig. We had this monstrously complicated system. Seriously, layers upon layers of abstraction built over years. It was supposed to be ‘enterprise grade’ or whatever.
Debugging was a nightmare. A simple request would bounce through half a dozen classes, interfaces, wrappers… trying to find where a bug originated took forever. We spent more time fighting the architecture than actually delivering features. It felt like we were just building complexity for complexity’s sake. Saw a senior guy leave purely because he couldn’t stand working on it anymore. Said he was going somewhere using simpler tools, just getting stuff done.
That whole experience kind of burned me out on overly engineered solutions. So when I heard about this ‘Andy Gibson’ idea focusing on radical simplicity, it sounded like a breath of fresh air. A complete opposite. I needed to see for myself if it was practical or just a pipe dream.
So yeah, it was an interesting experiment. Learned a bit about the trade-offs. Might use bits of this thinking to challenge my own tendency to over-engineer sometimes. But going full ‘Andy Gibson’? Probably only for very specific, small-scale things.