Post-structuralistic theories share the premise that reducing external complexity requires an equivalent increase in the internal complexity.

In other words (in social sciences); if you want to understand sociological aspects of ever increasing complexity, you must understand and use relevant theories that allow you to observe, analyze and understand it. So by increasing your inner complexity, the outer complexity is reduced (conceptually at least).

I think the premise is true for developers and software as well.

Anyone writing software knows that to control complexity, to maintain understanding of it while it grows, it is necessary to understand and apply principles of orthogonality to ensure this. We must increase our inner complexity, our mental models, to reduce the perceived complexity of the software.

The premise is also observable in most (good) software. We write APIs/components/frameworks etc. which makes difficult tasks easy to perform, but only at the cost of a corresponding higher complexity internal to the APIs/components/frameworks etc.

In conclusion: If you reduce the complexity in one part of the system, it must increase correspondingly in another, thus keeping the net complexity constant.

I’ve been out of the blogsphere the last couple of years, spending most of my time on my diploma of leadership, which I’ll finish ultimo June 24th this year.

But I’m back and I’ll be writing a bunch about software development, leadership and lastly about whisky, which I enjoy immensely.

Glad to be back :)