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Ernesto S
Ernesto S

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Frameworks - Analogy

Yesterday, I viewed an AppDev course overview video and an analogy comparing Frameworks to species that share DNA stuck out to me:

"Did you know that humans and chimpanzees share about 98% of their DNA, and it's only 2% that makes us different? Because most of our DNA is just the plumbing of being alive, having a metabolism and being a primate, and then just a little bit makes us distinct and we have exactly the same 98% because we had a common ancestor like, six to 10 million years ago. So similarly, Twitter and Airbnb share much of their code. And really any cloud-based application has the same kind of plumbing. You gotta have a web server, which lets you listen for HTTP requests, you gotta connect to the database. You have to have some rendering engine to render the UI.

Very much the same kind of code for every cloud-based app. And then a little tiny bit makes Twitter distinct from Airbnb. Airbnb has listings, Twitter has tweets. They both have users. Really, that's all that makes them distinct. Most of the plumbing is the same. And in particular, Twitter and Airbnb have a lot of their code is the same because they had a common ancestor." - Professor Raghu Betina

Being a novice to software development, this really helped drive the message home regarding frameworks. No need to reinvent the wheel and all that.

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