11–20 of 52 posts
We run an internal, fullstack platform that developers from other teams use to make their backend systems available to end users. To standardize design, we created grammar guidelines and fed instructions to an AI review bot. It catches about 90% of them. The rest we manage to find.
The answer is to just be vigilant, patient, and double-check their work.
Many IDEs support spellcheckers, so you could bump up the warning level on suspected spelling errors.
I've only rarely seen them cause run-time issues, but I guess that would be more significant in loosely typed languages where they could slip through to runtime errors more easily.
What dynamically typed scripting is involved?
If it’s JavaScript, you can gradually migrate to TypeScript and have a Git pre-commit hook to compile (with incremental compilation). And standardise on VSCode or a derivative that makes programmatic typos obvious. Many IDEs will also spell check your strings.
I had a similar co-worker 12 years ago. He was a wonderful person, very positive, always nice to deal with, but he clearly had dyslexia. He would type in passwords wrong in our password manager. And he was in charge of our backups so once it came time to restore a backup you discover that none of the passwords work.
He had a terrible track record, so bad that he was passed over for the annual salary bump, he eventually quit and became a middle manager at another company.
With that out the way. This person, unless completely not self aware, knows they can't spell and are making mistakes.
It's just a fact. Tell them to slow down and double check their work because they're making mistakes. Offer support and point them in the direction of help as appropriate per company guidelines.
But at the end of the day if they're causing issues, they're causing issues and they need to know. It's something they need to adapt to, not you to them.
You cannot engineer your way around this specific person's faults (for want of a better word). You'd have to do the same for the next person who was making mistakes.
TL;DR
Be up front and tell them they are making mistakes and need to improve. Offer support as required.
My spelling is often horrendous and I know it - but almost every dev I know of prefers to copy and paste anything that might be misspelled just because it's easier than taking the risk.
Similarly - how does does this get anywhere near causing a production outage?
I'd be tempted to view this as a blessing in disguise; this person sounds like they'll trip up more often than the rest, but if one individual can cause a production outage with spelling mistakes something's gone awry with your processes elsewhere. You have an opportunity to fix whatever that is now.
Can you get better tools to catch his mistakes earlier?