bytefish

What usually happens in my experience is, that a home-grown Data Access Layer usually turns into a bad "ORM light", because materializing results is repetitive and tiring work. You want to abstract it away.

As a .NET developer I think EF Core has made the right call here, by allowing you to write SQL where it's needed and still use its infrastructure for all the tedious work of materializing your results.

Admittedly in 2014, the time the article was written at, I've also felt using OR-Mapper is a dead-end. But in 2026 the world isn't black and white.

I had, yes. But those had also been rewritten with Gemini from ground up, because it caught way more edge cases, than I did. Which is fascinating and frightening at the same time.

I think my vibe-coding success also has to do with the problem being not that “novel” and prior art exists.

Nevertheless still impressive.

This resonates with my experience.

I have several Open Source projects and wanted to refactor them for a decade. A week ago I sat down with Google Gemini and completely refactored three of my libraries. It has been an amazing experience.

What’s a game changer for me is the feedback loop. I can quickly validate or invalidate ideas, and land at an API I would enjoy to use.

The first and most important lesson, that I try to each every young developer starting in the industry: Go home after clocking in your hours negotiated in your contract. Drop your pen. Go home. Sleep well.

And I hope, that every sensible senior developer in here does the same. Lead by example. Maybe it would prevent a few burnouts in this industry.

And if you are a manager, then send your people home after they have clocked in their negotiated hours. For their own well-being. It’s your responsibility. And if it’s not working, then force them to go home.

I hope you are better by now and got through the tough time. All the best for you!

As for the tree analogy and open source.

Yes, you cannot build years of community and trust in a weekend. But sometimes it's totally sufficient to plant a seed, give it some small amounts of water and leave it on its own to grow. Go ask my father having to deal with a huge maple tree, that I’ve planted 30 years ago and never cared for it.

Open Source projects sometimes work like this. I've created a .NET library for Firebase Messaging in a weekend a few years ago… and it grew on its own with PRs flowing in. So if your weekend project generates enough interest and continues to grow a community without you, what’s the bad thing here? I don’t get it.

Sometimes a tree dies and an Open Source project wasn’t able to make it.

That said, I’ve just finished rewriting four libraries to fix long standing issues, that I haven’t been able to fix for the past 10 years.

It's been great to use Gemini as a sparring partner to fix the API surface of these libraries, that had been problematic for the past 10 years. I was so quick to validate and invalidate ideas.

Once being one of the biggest LLM haters I have to say, that I immensely enjoy it right now.

To me, it’s super exciting to play ping pong with ideas up until I arrive at an architecture and interfaces, that I am fine with.

My whole life I have been reading other people’s code to accumulate best practices and improve myself. While a lot of developers start with reading documentation, I have always started with reading code.

And where I was previously using the GitHub Code Search to eat up as much example code as I could, I am now using LLMs to speed the whole process up. Enormously. I for one enjoy using it.

That said, I have been in the industry for more than 15 years. And all companies I have been at are full of data silos, tribal knowledge about processes and organically grown infrastructure, that requires careful changes to not break systems you didn’t even know about.

Actually most of my time isn’t put into software development at all. It’s about trying to know the users and colleagues I work with, understand their background and understand how my software supports them in their day to day job.

I think LLMs are very, very impressive, but they have a long way to go to reach empathy.

What I miss the most about the XML ecosystem is the tooling. And I think, this is what most people are sentimental about. There was a time it was so easy to generate contracts using XSDs and it made it easy to validate the data. OpenAPI slowly reaches parity to what I worked with in 2006.

But what I do not miss is the over-engineering that happened in the ecosystem, especially with everything SOAP. Yes, when it worked, it worked. But when it didn’t work, which was often the case when integrating different enterprise systems, then well… lord have mercy on me.

Sometimes I still use XSD to define a schema for clients, because in some areas there’s still better tooling for XML. And it gives me the safety of getting valid input data, if the XML couldn’t be validated.

And in the enterprise world, XML is far from being dead anyways.

Delete only works within a time frame and if there are no comments yet. I didn’t think quick enough and instead of posting the link twice I’ve edited it to this. Lots of bad decisions on my side. Now it’s also too late to edit.