Side Effects are The Complexity Iceberg
Talkat JCON Europe 2023 · on Thursday, 2023-06-22· at 15:00· Cinema Blackbox, Im Mediapark 1, 50670 Köln, Germany·
summary
Argues that side effects are hidden inputs and hidden outputs that drive accidental complexity and shows concrete countermeasures: Rust ownership to track mutability, Haskell-style types/contexts (monads) to expose effects in signatures, immutable data structures (solved in production for ~25 years), actor-style messaging and an append-only event log (the basis of Kafka) to make state changes testable and replayable. Demonstrates that systems built this way can reconstruct databases from logs, enable reliable auditing and simpler unit testing.
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chapters (17)
- 0:00Introduction and setup
- 1:48What are side effects?
- 5:17Hidden inputs and outputs
- 8:06Composition and hidden complexity
- 10:14Data mutation dangers
- 12:00Encapsulation and microservices
- 13:27Rust’s ownership model
- 14:29Immutable data structures
- 16:13Haskell’s context tracking
- 23:09Java and functional ideas
- 23:52Microservices and side effects
- 26:58Actors and event-driven systems
- 28:45Persistent queues and logs
- 31:55Data meshes and Kafka
- 32:39Inherent vs accidental complexity
- 34:04Practical takeaways
- 35:55Q&A
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