A documentary about an eco-friendly home near Austin inspired me to think about software systems from an ecological perspective.

The notion of a software or product “ecosystem” isn’t new, but I’d previously only thought about it as fostering healthy interactions in a system; I hadn’t considered the non-human actors. Is the code hard to maintain? Are alerts waking people up unnecessarily? Is the business sustainable? Is there a natural order? Is anything out of place, like an old tire in a stream? Can we achieve our goals in harmony with the natural order?

For example, I worked on a free service that would alert when resources were exhausted. Because it was free, it was natural for consumers deprioritize efficient usage. Maintainers of the service absorbed the cost in the form of routine alerts. A more balanced system would shift some cost to the consumers.

I think the idea of separating concerns is another example. Decoupling can reduce maintenance cost even if the functionality doesn’t change.

A colleague once remarked that every syntax variation allowed by a language would eventually appear in a code base; a convention could not stop this. Perhaps this was another example of an imbalanced natural order. The cost of enforcement was solely on the reviewer. Shifting this cost to programmatic validation, like a linter, would help restore balance.