This is very cool, thank you for the write-up.
What caught my eye is the complexity you assign to a project like this. It’s hairy but I wouldn’t call it super complicated. I find that super interesting to be honest because it probably means that it is really hard and I am just used to this shit now and it all looks doable to me now.
I never think of anything as “complex”, certainly not my own work and I always think what other people do is so much more impressive but I’m starting to realize it might be a me-issue.
I worked on some pretty hairy nonsense like say a DB replication solution but I still think it was just tangly, not complex like say a particle collider. Maybe I also need to call my work super complex and highly abstract. Now that I think of it I have a history of not being taken seriously while others with easy shit get credits.
Thanks, and I can definitely relate to not wanting to assign complexity to one's own work. I think the trick there is that, once you know how to do something, it doesn't seem hard, even if acquiring the knowledge and skills to do it is itself quite a challenge. And I agree that, in some senses, it's not /that/ hard - I mean I'm not proving P=NP, here. It's a software engineering problem, with existing solutions. That said, there is a spectrum of difficulty, even within software engineering problems with existing solutions. Fizzbuzz is less complex than distributed systems. This particular problem strikes me as rather difficult, and one way you can tell (beyond the stuff I mention in the post around serialization, UI paradigms, meta applications, etc) is that earlier models /couldn't/ do it. Which is why Fable being able to, when they could not, was so exciting to me.
Imposter syndrome maybe?
In a way, nothing is complex at the point where you have untangled it, by definition. Software development is, after all, the art of untangling complexity. The real challenge is (re-)imagining something in the simplest way that fits the goal you are given. When you have arrived there, everything seems obvious and simple. But not everybody could have done it.