Andreas Ohlund’s talk on New and Shiny things in NServiceBus 3.0 is available here.

By the way, we’ve now got a beta out of NServiceBus 3.0 – get it here.

Yves Goeleven will be giving a talk on simplifying distributed application development with NServiceBus and the Windows Azure Platform on Jan 31 – details here.

Carl and Richard over at Dot Net Rocks interviewed me at the Oredev conference in Sweden about Domain Driven Design and one of my pet peeves – the use of Customer in example applications. Get it here.

I’m also happy to announce that registration for my 5-day Advanced Distributed Systems Design course has now opened for Bad Ems Germany and New York, in addition to the already open registrations for Austin TX and London. Information and registration on my training page.

I’ve also made some progress with the recording of the course – you can now access days 1, 2, and part of day 3 – covering distributed systems theory, coupling, messaging patterns, bus and broker architectural style, SOA building blocks, and the hotel management SOA exercise. Information and purchase available here.

Since that post I’ve blogged about many techniques and approaches to identify better boundaries (like with SOA and DDD) and I’m seeing more and more developers starting to apply them.

This post will be slightly different.

You see, occasionally we technical people will get requirements that can’t easily be broken down by functional boundaries. Sometimes the business calls this a “platform” – here’s an example:

“We want a flexible, customizable workflow-driven platform that allows end-users to add their own columns to any screen able to support massive datasets for large enterprise customers that will also be intuitive and easy to use for our SaaS push to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) – oh, and then it needs to be multi-tenant too. Did I mention that we promised this would be ready for our most important client by the end of the year?”

There is only one reasonable answer to the above:

“I know you want it but, I’m very sorry, you can’t have that. It isn’t possible to do that with one system.”

It’s really rare for a technical person to say something like that. The simple reason is that in software, we believe that almost everything is fundamentally possible – given enough time/money/resources. So, when someone in business comes to us with the requirements above, we say “It’s *possible*”, loosely translated to “We can’t prove that that’s impossible”.

There are many reasons why you can’t be SaaS and Enterprise at the same time – not all of them dealing with software. The marketing, sales, and support stories of each of those markets is VERY different. In the enterprise you’re usually working with professional services people that customize the generic product – which then becomes a backwards-compatibility requirement for new development. This will hinder the development team’s ability to roll out the new shiny features needed to remain competitive in the SaaS space.

In the cases where I’ve been brought in to help clients with these kinds of systems, I try to work my way up to the person in management who is in charge of the project/product – often the CEO. Then, in the nicest way possible, I explain that really the only way to have your cake and eat it too is to create 2 companies – each one focused on its own space – Saas and Enterprise; each one with its own development team, feature set, release schedule, etc.

There’s a reason that there’s an SAP *and* a Salesforce – it’s because no one can be all things to all people. It’s hard enough to become a market leader in just one space. Trying to do both is VERY expensive, and increases the chance of the project failing from the average 60-70% in the industry to probably about 99.9%.

Hope that will save you some grief.

Java takes the enterprise

When Java originally came out, it was an interesting language that you could use to write applets – code that would run the same everywhere, in the browser, on the desktop, etc. SUN was the keeper of Java. And then came this concept of a container – the thing that would run your Java code, which then grew to handle things like transactions, and became the Enterprise Java Bean – EJB, and that came out of IBM, with SUN adopting it later.

The adoption of Java at that point was important enough that the specs were opened up, and many EJB technologies blossomed. With backing from big companies already inside the enterprise, the only possible fight came from COBOL around Y2K, but that was a dying gasp. Microsoft wasn’t in the game as Windows NT wasn’t competition for UNIX or mainframes.

Multi-vendor as a way of life

With multiple big and medium-sized vendors offering similar, competing, and complementary technologies, all tied together by the promise of backwards compatibility in Java and the specs demanding interoperability, customers could safely go for best-of-breed solutions. This forced technological decision makers to truly evaluate the offerings on merits, not just lineage.

Many attribute the rise of OSS in Java to the fact that the existing containers were so heavyweight. I believe that was a secondary effect. As a result of the fact that the industry had embraced and internalized the values of thinking and choosing for itself, it was willing to look at alternatives with much humbler lineage, ultimately using them on their merits. It was the culture.

The Microsoft ecosystem

This culture was practically nonexistent on the Microsoft side of the border. As the only vendor, Microsoft was put on a pedestal – it was the best, period. The industry hungrily looked to Seattle not only for technology, but also for guidance and leadership. If a developer could get a job at Microsoft, they were “hot stuff”, the best of the best. This isn’t a bad thing – it was just a thing.

This enabled technological decision makers on the Microsoft side to have much shorter thought and decision processes than their counterparts on the Java side.

All of these things got baked into the culture.

About Microsoft

Like all that were ever on a pedestal, the fall was a matter of time. Expectations being that high, it was inevitable. You can’t make all people happy all the time, and the conditions in the industry were changing, and the company had to change to remain competitive.

Let me say this clearly: Microsoft was not at fault.

Sure, it’s easy to say in retrospect they should have communicated more clearly about this, or built that technology differently. If you haven’t yet worked in a big company, you may not know this, but big companies aren’t just bigger small companies. It’s a hodge-podge of competing agenda, initiatives, politics, people, and power. There’s a saying that things only get done despite the organization’s best efforts.

For a company Microsoft’s size, what they manage to get done is incredible.

On acquisitions and OSS

Microsoft has come under fire over the years for offering their own implementations of open source technologies- as if the vendors on the Java side didn’t do this. The Java world was ultra competitive, the big vendors would eat promising upstarts in order to win back lost contracts to key customers. This made the technological decision makers broaden their thought processes to include risk management as a part of managing their technological portfolio. To a large extent, this actually justifies the existence of a C-level role related to technology – the CIO.

Chief Officers of Information and Technology

I found it interesting to see the difference in age, experience, background, and thought processes between people holding the CIO title at organizations that were Microsoft-centric and those with a more heterogeneous technology investment. This was likely influenced to a large extent by the history of technological evolution, age and size of organizations with the resulting culture and hiring practices, among other things. This pattern continued with the CTO as well.

Obviously one wouldn’t expect the same thought processes in the CTO of a 20 person IT shop and the CTO of Ford Motor Company (for example). They shouldn’t be the same.

It appeared that as Microsoft became more focused on innovation they started listening more to the technology leaders of smaller companies, not a bad thing by itself. Choosing A means not choosing B, and in order to stay competitive, a choice must be made.

Fast forward

I think that what happened was necessary, and will be good for the industry and Microsoft. Technological decision making in companies that were traditionally Microsoft-centric has evolved. This has clarified Microsoft’s role as a platform vendor who can be trusted, and whose tools can be used or not used as the situation dictates, with comparable commercial and OSS tooling evaluated on the same criteria.

Just as IBM reinvented itself and now occupies a sustainable role in a combined commercial and OSS ecosystem of platforms, tools, and services, Microsoft appears to have made several big strides partnering with the community in much more productive ways, yet with more strides to be made as well.

A challenge to OSS on the Microsoft platform

In this new and more mature environment, OSS can’t remain the same either. Some code a developer whipped up in their free time and put in an online accessible repository with a decent license just won’t cut it any more.

In my previous post I called out the Linq2Sql support story – the same goes for OSS. Active development is required, and so is support, and so is documentation. The commitment needs to be much more serious.

Also, until usage reaches some critical mass, it is unlikely that a single developer or even a small group of committers will be able to do it without the help of the community. Really the only alternative is for there to be some commercial story that can fund it – support, consulting, training, commercial add-ons, etc. A combination of community (both dev and use) and commercial cash-flow is probably most sustainable.

If you are running an OSS project, understand that these criteria will be used to evaluate it.

In closing

I think I’ve managed to alienate previous supporters from all sides.

I believe we are entering some interesting times, where not only are vendors and OSS projects being evaluated differently than in the past, but that traditional architectural paradigms are changing as well.

Regardless of what the answers are, I’m happy that more of us are asking more questions. Some questions are the right questions, some are the wrong ones, and sometimes we just ask at the wrong time, but as an industry I think that we’re getting better.

Thanks for reading.

Since there’s quite a lot of content already posted, and it not being terribly easy to navigate, in my coming blog posts I will be trying to point to those older posts so that my newer readers have an easier time finding their way around. I also want to thank my existing subscribers for their patience through this all.

If you do have any questions or comments, please feel free to post them. I don’t think I’ve left a single posted question unanswered over the past 5 or so years of blogging, so it really is a good way to get my attention (now that the blog spam finally seems under control).

Good having you here.

While I usually take the Groucho Marx approach about groups that would have me as a member, this is different.

With members including Scott Ambler, James Bach, Kent Beck, Alistair Cockburn, Ward Cunningham, Tom DeMarco, Jim Highsmith, Ron Jeffries, Tim Lister, Michael Rosen, Johanna Rothman, and Ed Yourdon (to name not so few), I am honoured to be welcomed as a peer.

I’ve written an Executive Update as a part of the Enterprise Architecture Advisory Service available to Cutter clients which can be found here:

The Logging Service: Fallacy or Feature?

Well, because Microsoft (or insert vendor of your choice here – they’re all equally guilty of this) tend to deprecate (as in kill) the technology they evangelised just last year/month/week.

Microsoft Sql Server Notification Services are the latest victim.

I hope you don’t have any application code tied to that technology.

Not that it’s the only one.

Workflow Foundation’s warts have started coming out from behind the shiny veneer. It turns out that the threading model is… problematic and requires all sorts of workarounds. Hope those are stable. It’s not like they could have known that we need a high performance way to run our business logic out of the box. I hope you don’t have to change your application code (sorry, pictures diagrams) when you get blocked threads when trying to cancel irrelevant workflows (customer no longer does business with us – cancel order processing workflows).

I forgot to mention that the solution above is for single-box parallelism – if you want true scale-out, you need to go back to solution that “require talented software developer use of call-external-method and handle-external-event activities along with the CLR thread-pool“. That’s OK – I have yet to meet a team/company who attests that they have below average developers.

I apologize for the somewhat sarcastic tone of this post.

It’s just that I’m sick of Microsoft handing developers razor-sharp knives, pointy end forward, and after the developer loses a couple of fingers mentions “oh yah, watch out for these pointy, sharp bits”.

To the developers out there – maybe we need kevlar suits before handling these hazardous materials.

To Microsoft – you think that this doesn’t alienate your customers?

We’re all in the same boat together.

I’m hoping that ALT.NET can help.

It sucks that not enough people have access to guys like Arnon, but he’s pretty busy with his baby now. Although I’ve been trying to jet to clients providing the same kind of value, I’ve pretty much topped out at 10 of these per year each running about a week on average. Frankly, I don’t think my wife would keep me if I did any more than that

Long Distance Relationships

          After doing a bunch of these sessions using Skype, Copilot, Oovoo (for video sharing), and now trying (and liking) Microsoft SharedView I’ve found that I can provide a lot of the architectural guidance and value remotely. This spans all the distributed systems stuff including nServiceBus, using O/R mapping and the Domain Model pattern for logic-rich persistence, asynchronous web architectures, and designing occasionally connected clients (which I’ll be putting more guidance out for shortly).

The fact that Scott said this couldn’t work is a point in it’s favour, though

Just kidding. He had no idea that Big Design Up-Front could be so yummy:

“I think the real value’s in preventative work – where you try to help folks out during the early ideation of their architecture rather than bail them out once they’ve put more investment in designing stuff on paper that doesn’t jive with experience.”

The format that I’ve found works really well for most mid-sized web and enterprise systems is 3 to 4 sessions, each roughly an hour, spread out over a couple of weeks. That gives enough time to cover the non-functional aspects of high-availability (how many 9’s each part of the system really needs), reliability (preventing message and data loss in case of failure), scalability (you know, not that stateless stuff where adding more boxes just causes the DB, and the rest of the system with it, to slow down), etc. We usually end up with several UML diagrams covering structure and behaviour, code samples for each part of the system, config files for the open-source frameworks we use – in other words, a working end-to-end slice.

All that I know how to do.

Clueless

          What I don’t have a clue about is how to get people who could really benefit from this sort of thing to know that it exists. I’m not a marketing guy and wouldn’t know how to bring a horse to water, let alone make it drink.

So I’m asking for your help.

If you know someone who’s at that phase in their project where they need to make a bunch of decisions in terms of which technologies to use and how to use them, or someone who’s looking for a sounding board for their ideas before diving into code, or anyone else for that matter who you’d feel would be well served here – help me help them.

Just so everything’s above board here, and you know what you’re pointing your trusting colleagues to, here’s the full deal:

For less than what most UI control suites will cost, you get 3 full video, app-sharing, design and coding sessions which will save your project between 10 to 100 times as much money as you spent. I’m serious. My track record is currently 8 for 8.

That’s it. The bottom line. $750 to save up to $75,000.

Leave a comment. Let me know what you think. Please.

If I’m totally off my rocker here, save me some embarrassment.

If you think this is a great deal, then give the nay-sayers above a run for their money.

If you’d really like to see a different offering, or have any other ideas, do me a favour and tell me.

Finally, a big thank you to all my readers and subscribers. I don’t express my gratitude nearly as much as I should and get so much from this blog and have you to thank for it. Here’s hoping the next 4 years will be as fulfilling as the last 4.

Keep It Simple.

I have been trying to keep busy besides “just” the blog.

I finally set nServiceBus free. And am probably more pleased with myself than I should be

The Ask Udi podcast does a bit towards getting some feedback from you, but I’m pretty sure that you feel (as do I) that it’s too “fire-and-forget” since it can take a month or more for my answer to come online. I do want to give a quick shout out to Bill who has been extremely patient with me and keeps sending me nice meaty questions. Thanks Bill!

Just recently I’ve floated a new endeavour called ArchiTips, hoping to get some of you to share your tips with the rest of the community because, let’s face it, I talk way too much as it is already. Even if you don’t have a big write-up for your tip, just fire me an email with a sentence or two and I’ll find the way to package it for mass consumption.

Finally, I’ve recently started doing some remote consulting with a couple of my blog’s readers, one in Florida, the other in Ireland. I must say that it’s working quite a bit better than I would have imagined and that they’re getting value from it. Both are in the initial phases of a serious web system upgrade and are looking at their architecture again with an eye on scalability and simplicity (my two favorite ‘S’ words). For me, it was great really getting to know them and I’d like to do more of this.

So here’s what I had in mind (bonus for you for reading this far!)

I want to give away 10 remote consulting sessions, each of them half-an-hour long. I know that it’s not enough for everybody but I want to see if this will work at all before trying to scale it up. Leave a comment below if you’re interested – or an email if you really need the privacy. Tell me a bit about yourself, what kind of work you’re doing, and how you think I could help. Also, let me know if you’d be willing to have yourself recorded so that we can put our conversation up as a podcast for others to benefit from – you’ll always have the right to veto this should you regret you’re initial decision later.

I’m hoping this lower latency communication will help turn things up a notch, and I’m looking forward to hearing from you.

BTW, I won’t necessarily be choosing the first 10 that I receive. I’ll try to get an even split between those who agree to have their conversation come online and those who require more privacy. Believe me, I’ve worked at some places who were pretty over-the-top when it came to confidentiality and IP and all that – I know what you guys have to deal with.

So, umm, let’s go.

(Gosh, I hope the comments won’t stay empty. Wouldn’t I look dumb.)

ALT.NET is a new, developer-organized global community started by several influencers including David Laribee, Scott Bellware, Roy Osherove and others. What differentiates this community from the many user groups already in existence is its focus on pragmatic values rather than technology. However, some debate has already arisen around the perceived elitism of such a group.  Martin Fowler commented that: "I have high hopes for the ALT.NET community. I believe this kind of community is important to the viable future of the Microsoft ecosystem, and I want a healthy Microsoft world."

Continue reading…

How about you?

Now back to my plan to take over the world…

First of all, kudos to the P&P aka PAG team. You guys are doing a tremendous amount of good for the broad Microsoft community. Something I’m not sure anyone outside of Microsoft could have done. I know I give you guys a lot of heckling but it is meant in the most constructive way possible. Altogether, never have I seen Microsoft this open to feedback – to the point of actively seeking it out in many cases.

That said, here’s my response to Ayende and some more general meandering thoughts.

Ayende, you are free to use or not use any tool, technology, or platform you like. Your clients listen to you and appreciate your judgement, so they follow your advice not to use the software developed by the PAG team. However, the guys and gals from PAG do more than release software. There are numerous articles, whitepapers, and guidance that they put out which in many cases references prior non-Microsoft work. I often suggest my clients look at that guidance and read the related articles and books, as well as other material both by Microsoft and not. Just for full disclosure, I write articles fairly often which are published on Microsoft’s sites and in their magazines.

I too do not use the software artifcats developed by the PAG group. I also spent many hours face to face with the people there who architected and built those artifacts explaining why, as well as providing suggestions as to how they can improve. This is true for other core technologies provided by Microsoft including WCF, WF, and BizTalk. I am continuing in this pattern with new technologies like the ADO.NET Entity Framework. I try to give just as much feedback to the open source community like those doing Dependency Injection (Spring and StructureMap) and Object/Relational Mapping (NHibernate). Ayende does it differently – he actively supports and develops those open source alternatives. I think that both approaches are valuable.

I’m not worried that because the PAG released an application block, factory, or framework my work will be in any way worsened. On the contrary, I have found that many developers are much more open to listening about more advanced patterns and implementations after they have experienced the PAG’s offerings, than before they did. This is in no way meant to denigrate those offerings. On the contrary. Together, we are increasing the overall level of the community. Each building on the work of the other. So what if things aren’t perfect today. They’re better than they were a couple years ago. What with the broad adoption of the CAB, I can have in-depth discussions around the value Supervising Controller brings over the MVP implementation of the CAB. That could not have happened otherwise.

Also, I haven’t seen anyone that’s been using what Ayende considers superior open source offerings stop doing that because the PAG group released a “competing version”. If anything, I attribute much of the success NHibernate has been having with Microsoft continued starts and stops with ObjectSpaces, WinFS, etc. I think that the same will be true for open source Dependency Injection frameworks as the PAG speak more and more about their ObjectBuilder.

So my bottom line is: We all win together.

Then was Udi Dahan on What to Test and When. Udi is such a great speaker, so much energy when he talks, he sounded like Anthony Robbins on software testing. He focused on the importance of testing every aspect of the software on each iteration, specially the risky parts: performance, security, complex business logic and external interfaces.

Wow. It’s not every day you get compared to a modern-day icon.

Thank you, Marc-Andre.

The most interesting thing is that the knowledge investment you make in paratechnology has a (much) longer lifespan than that in technology directly. Those of us who have perfected our skills in VB6 found that .NET obseleted much of that. The same is true for Microsoft’s Web Service Enhancements, EJBs, etc. Even the languages themselves are changing substantially – as are their runtimes. However, object-orientation seems to be holding its own well into its 3rd decade. I suspect Domain-Driven Design (DDD) to enjoy a long life as well. Beyond just being a lifetime issue, these paratechnological entities just seem to build on each other more and more. In order to understand higher order patterns, lower one need to be understood first. These patterns increase the scale of the problems that can be solved repeatably. 

It has been my experience that those developers with similar experience-in-years, but only technological knowledge, are less productive than their peers with more paratechnological knowledge. I measure productivity in terms of number of feature points per unit of time. I understand that this is biased against infrastructure developers in application development teams – but I haven’t figured out how to measure them yet (at least, not well enough to say anything about it).

Therefore, it is my thesis that developers should spend at least the same amount of time investing in paratechnological learning as technological learning. It is my suggestion that a 3-to-1 ratio would be even better – as in only a quarter of your time on technological study. I submit that the on-the-job work done with a given technology, including the figuring out how to do something that you haven’t done before, is enough. When I’m talking about “study”, I’m referring to courses, conferences, books read (not when looking sometime up). 

For me, the way that I find out (most) of what I need to know about a technology (not necessarily new), is to grill an expert on it. For instance, at TechEd Developers Barcelona 2006, I had the good fortune to sit with the Workflow Foundation guys for at least an hour, the WCF guys for about 3 hours total, WPF for half an hour, and the CAB guys for almost 4 hours – not all in one sitting Anyway, it was mostly me asking how to solve thorny issues I’m having difficulty with in my projects, and them trying to explain to me, in a way I’d understand, that most people don’t have my problems. Personally, I think that, if that’s true, “most people” just haven’t noticed yet There were also numerous new ways of doing things that I didn’t consider to be an issue, so I tried to focus my learning on other things.

And I guess that that’s my bottom line. When new technology comes along, you shouldn’t need to “start over”. The way that I design my systems, most technology is hidden away. WPF changes how my views are implemented – but that’s tucked behind an interface so that my supervising controllers don’t care. WCF changes how messages are transferred over the network, but that’s tucked away behind an “IBus” interface; message dispatch is also abstracted with “IMessageHandler” and “IMessage”.  By the way, I find WPF to be very interesting in improving the human-to-human interface between Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) professionals and developers. 

So… Invest wisely. Compound interest is your friend.

“The first law of distributed systems development is “Don’t”. But sometimes systems are just too big for a single machine. Join Udi for practical tips and tricks gleaned from years of developing large scale, mission critical systems.”

Not to worry, any new content appearing there will appear here too.

“Hello Mr. Dahan,

I just wanted to let you know that I found your discussion on REST vs. Web services very interesting. Two years ago, I got to learn about Web services and WSDL, in order to figure out if I can use that to communicate
between two application servers. Unfortunately, at that time, I discovered
the way we were accessing the server, was for development only, and there
was no production support for Web services on the server at that time.

Thinking for the future, after hearing your discussion on REST, I’m going
to start researching more information on it, to see if maybe I can use
that method to transport information.

Do you know of any websites I can go to to learn more about this?

About your show, please spell out your email and website for us. I was
listening to it in the car on mp3, and had no idea on how to contact you.

Thank you.

Peter *****
Web developer (XHTML, Java, Javascript, XML)”

Well, Peter, thank you for your kind words. It’s really great knowing that I’m not just shouting into the endless void of the internet and that what I’m saying makes a difference. And I will take your suggestions to heart about spelling out the site and email. Who knew people would have a hard time spelling UdiDahan? It sounds just how its spelled

About the sites on REST – well there are a lot. Although most are quite superficial – nothing that would show you how to implement anything but a trivial application. To tell you the truth, I’m not sure that the REST architectural style jives with transaction processing that well. I have yet to see an example that both models the system entities as URIs and can transactionally update several of them at once.

Anyway, Peter, thanks again. And best of luck with your REST excursions.

But can you really expect a developer who doesn’t have a solid grasp of OO principles to define a decent architecture? And who would check the results?

I strongly believe that we, as an industry, need to focus more on gradually bringing up the level of the developers that are out there, rather than trying to force a broad spectrum step function.

I mean, if the detailed design is crap, does it matter what the architecture looks like?

Podcast number 4 is about Domain Driven Design (DDD), layered architectures, the different kinds of workflow, and of course SOA. This podcast was triggered by Paul Gielens blog post on “Applying the application layer in Domain Driven Design” where he discussed the combination DDD and workflow of various kinds. The reason I found this topic pertinent to SOA has to do with the total lack of discussion around how services should be structured.

I mean, everybody’s going on and on about SOA this, ESB that, EDA over here, and 2.0 over there, but nobody’s talking about the details. Probably all the devils down there scared them off.

So, in podcast 4 we get into the different kinds of layers described in DDD – specifically the Application Layer, and discuss what exactly goes into this layer when developing a service and not an application. Also, we mention the different kinds of workflow (business rules, long running processes, and orchestration/choreography) and what layers they belong to.

And in podcast number 5 we get right in the middle of one of the most heated debates around SOA: REST vs. Web Services, so stay tuned!

If you haven’t yet subscribed, what are you waiting for?! Get your weekly SOA fix delivered right to your desktop here.

Also, don’t forget to check out my new podcast on the Dr. Dobbs site – “Ask Udi”, the podcast where listeners get their questions on SOA and Web Services answered. The first installment answers the question: “Does SOA mean the end of OO?”.

Feel free to leave comments either here or there.

I’m an architect. I code.
I intend to keep coding.
This includes production code.

One of the main purposes I code is to show programmers I concrete example of an implementation of the design. Not just to show, but to explain – both the code and the design; why this code is better than alternative approaches. Its very important for me to pass on the spirit of the code/design. Since I can’t be everywhere all the time, I need everybody working on the project consistently making their own micro-decisions that are harmonious with the overall project direction.

There are also many cases where I develop particularly technologically complicated modules, but this isn’t because of my architect hat – its because I’m an expert in those given technologies. When it comes to deep performance optimization in the database, for example, I don’t do those. I let the person best suited to the job take care of it.

To sum up, I think my coding has made me a better application architect, but probably has had less of an impact at the level of solution architecture. There are also so many other activities that people with the role of architect perform, which aren’t architecture, that are key to their success. I have seen many successful architects who don’t code, and many unsuccessful architects who do. Why was it that the issue of coding ballooned in the first place?