How do you know if you are overengineering? Specific example in mind (programming.dev)

submitted 3 months ago by Cyno@programming.dev to c/learn_programming@programming.dev

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I will frame the question in terms of a specific C# objective that I am working on right now but I imagine the question is a pretty general one related to the Dunning-Kruger effect, in a way - how do you know how to build an application when you don't know all the issues you are supposed to prevent?

There is a message hub and I am developing a consumer for it. The original plan was to just create a few background services that get initialized alongside the application, that have a loop to load new messages/events and then process them.

Some time has passed and it feels like I am knees deep in Wolverine, Quartz, Hangfire, MassTransit, transactional outbox and all manner of different related things now. The potential issues are dealing with downtime, preventing loss of messages by storing them in a separate table before processing them, and everyone on the planet has a different idea on how to prevent and solve them and none of them sound simple and straightforward.

Honestly at this point I don't know enough about which problems are going to appear down the line and if I need to use third party libraries, but I am guessing they exist for a reason and people aren't supposed to just manually create their own amateurish implementations of them instead? But how do you know where to draw a line when you don't know exactly the problems that you are supposed to be solving?
What are the problems with having a table for the message queue over a whole 3rd party library for it, or what's wrong with the MS BackgroundService class? How are you supposed to know this?

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[-] FizzyOrange@programming.dev 2 points 3 months ago

The only way you know before doing it is through experience. If you don't already know you can make a prototype, or just guess and go for it - you might have to change it later though.

I would recommend prototyping when the cost of correcting a wrong decision later is going to be really high.

The other option if you don't have experience is just to copy what other people have done.

this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2025

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