Originally published at: The Hard Thing About Abstraction - Golioth
Our lives are built on abstraction. It is what allows us build things much faster than we previously could. A person, or a group of people, decides that everyone else shouldn’t need to think about the gritty details of a problem — and voila, a new layer in the stack! This is great until someone comes along and builds on that new layer, then discovers it obfuscates a lower level detail that they need. The abstraction that was intended to be, and in many cases is, an enabler has suddenly become a hindrance. There are a few options for how abstraction builders can choose to handle this trade-off. The simplest solution is to decide that they are targeting a narrow audience, acknowledging that they won’t be a good fit for everyone. In reality, nearly all technology is optimized for some subset of the total possible consumers. Even the most ubiquitous products are disliked by some, and don’t fit the requirements of others. Choosing where you want to exist on the spectrum from a narrow audience to a broad one is critically important when designing a product. Another option is to break the abstraction layer into a set of smaller, modular abstractions that can be assembled in a variety of configurations. This typically enables faster iteration, and when exposed to end-users, widens the audience for the product. The downside is that you are also pushing more cognitive burden onto the end-user, forcing them to understand multiple components and how they should piece them together. Like any early-stage company, we at Golioth have wrestled with where we fall on the “audience spectrum”. Historically, we have leaned towards a more opinionated platform, prioritizing…
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