Everything in Computing is CRUD

It's very common for junior developers to over emphasise the importance (and complexity) of their own solutions, claiming they "do so much more than just simple CRUD". This is an over engineering trap, that prohibits you from creating simple code, which just so happens to consistently outperform more complex solutions on all important parameters. I personally suspect it's a need arising from uncertainty, forcing the developer to advocate his solutions as "complex", because he or she wants to be perceived as doing "complex engineering", and not be reduced to a simple "CRUD monkey" ...

Once you realise that basically everything you do is CRUD, you can more easily identify your own engineering mistakes, and start removing stuff, until only the hard core solution remains. In this process you will eliminate bugs, reduce cognitive complexity, and create more easily maintained code. Below is a video where I talk about unit testing, but really the over engineering problem is universal, and infects everything we do.

I see CRUD everywhere!

Every time I talk about CRUD I feel like that little 6 year old child in the movie the 6th sense. Because from my point of view almost everything is CRUD. SQL is CRUD, it's just using different verbs. HTTP is CRUD again, with different verbs. Even Kubernetes is "simple CRUD", and if you read its documentation, you will realise that even its creators are referring to it as CRUD in its documentation. In fact, when John Resig was speaking about jQuery and "orthogonal APIs" some 20 years ago, he was basically just reinventing CRUD. And referring to it as CRUD makes it easier to understand, implement, and maintain.

When people downplay CRUD's importance, it's almost as if something dies inside of me. This effect of course originates from the fact that CRUD has not been considered "sexy", and you won't find it as a requirement for vacant positions. Instead you'll find requirements such as.

• Document Database Systems
• RDBMS (SQL)
• HTTP standard
• Kubernetes
• Docker
• Etc ... (facts are, it's all just CRUD)

It's basically all just "simple CRUD", and by realising that, understanding the basic axioms required to maintain your code is drastically simplified.

CRUD is the axiom around which computing revolves. Remove CRUD, and there's nothing left!

Without CRUD your super computer cluster is effectively no more than a "fancy calculator", because without CRUD, state cannot exist - And without state, we cannot collect data, at which point there's no data to read. The very word "data" itself, requires CRUD to simply exist. So when Satya Natella says "enterprise apps are effectively just CRUD with some business logic scattered here and there", not only is he perfectly describing enterprise apps, but he's also describing computing in general.

Facts are, CRUD is the basic building block of computing, and the fact that you're doing "simple CRUD stuff", and that you're willing to admit that fact, should be the first question the interviewer asks when hiring for a new position - And if the candidate doesn't instantly agree, you can safely ignore him or her, due to suffering from an "over engineering psychosis" ...

I am sorry to break this to you but we're all just "CRUD monkeys" ...

Psst, if you agree, you should check out our CRUD generator.