[plainnoodles]

I'm not a greybeard by any stretch, but I personally get a lot of mileage out of just stopping to ask: Does the extra layer of abstraction, or extraction of code to a method, or creation of a class - does it make the code *right now* easier to understand? If yes, do it, if not, don't.

The example I keep coming back to is when I was a junior, one of the other juniors refactored the database handling code in one of our apps to use a class hierarchy. "AbstractDatabaseConnection" "DatabaseConnection" etc. And mind you this was on top of the java.sql abstractions already present.

I don't necessarily know what his end goal was, since the code still seemed pretty tightly coupled to how java and postgres handle connections and do SQL. One might theoretically now be able to create a testing dummy connection that responds to sql calls and returns pre-baked data. But the functions we had were already refactored to be pure functions, and the IO was just IO with no business logic.

Anyway, all it ended up doing was making it so I never touched the database code in that app ever again. Integration testing was handled by just hooking it up to a test db via cli args and auto-clicking the UI. And eventually when people started side-stepping it, I took the opportunity (years later) to just go back in and replace both it and all the side-stepped code with plain ole java.sql stuff that literally anyone with two thumbs and 6 months of java experience could understand.

So now, unless I have some really strong plan (usually backed up with a prototype I used to plan out the abstraction) for an abstraction model, I just write code, extracting things where the small-scale abstractions improve current readability, and wait for bigger patterns (and business needs) to emerge before trying to clamp down on things with big prescriptive abstraction models.