Pointers, loose coupling, indirectness and the interesting link between them with some surprising hidden pitfalls
Lately I was working at work with various services, maybe one or two microservices. I also worked a bit on an open source project, entity framework core. And then I remembered about pointers which I learned in the first year at university. Now you ask me, what do these things have in common? Lets start firstly with pointers. Usually in programming you can access a resource directly from the code. This resource can be a number, an integer or just about anything else. But by using pointers you don't access the resource directly. The pointer is pretty much a number that has a deeper meaning in a context. Now to access that resource, you need to do a bit of translation. You don't access it directly anymore in the code. You have to figure out where it points to and then see what was the last value that was assigned in the place its pointing to. Then you know the actual value it points to. So there is kind of jump in the normal workflow when accessing a resou...