Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What is the first thing you implement at a new company?

news.ycombinator.com

21–30 of 293 posts

Re: Ask HN: What is the first thing you implement at a new company?

#21
post #5

What's three amigos? Never heard that term in programming.

I had to google that as well. It seems to be an agile practice [0] that consist in gathering a developer, a product owner and a QA tester in order to produce acceptance tests using the format given/when/then. [0] http://jonkruger.com/blog/2012/01/04/the-three-amigos/

Nice. I suppose the code is the singing bush then. And the end user is the invisible swordsman [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9vPvHO8Kp4

Re: Ask HN: What is the first thing you implement at a new company?

#22

Linting and code style guidelines. Easy to introduce, but makes a big positive difference.

In that vein, I invariably have one massive commit on every project to remove trailing whitespace first. That way when my well-behaved editor removes them with each commit, it's not littering up the diff.

Re: Ask HN: What is the first thing you implement at a new company?

#25
post #6

For the first month or so I take a very humble listening position, even if I immediately see things I want to fix. More often then not, there is a background and a history to things that could lead to a) my “fix” being unnecessary and/or ill-informed and b) friction with the rest of the team because here comes a whippersnapper upending all our stuff. Process and code fixes are _much_ easier once you have good rapport…

> Process and code fixes are _much_ easier once you have good rapport with the team.

And one doesn't get that by walking into a place expecting to make sweeping changes.

What's worse is job hoppers were asked so this means people are going into a shop, making these changes, and leaving shortly after. The hell?

Re: Ask HN: What is the first thing you implement at a new company?

#27

1. Every now and then we run into Paywall. Give everyone employee debit card so that they can buy stuff which helps their productivity. 2. CI using Drone.io 3. Add trello 4. Everyone gets their own AWS account. It makes it trivial for them to experiment with new ideas from their home or at office without begging anyone for credentials. You start by empowering your employees. Now, we consult startups which work differ…

Do you have a list of companies you consult for by any chance?

Re: Ask HN: What is the first thing you implement at a new company?

#28
It war rare to find places with automated build. My first priority was always to get humans out of the equation because as a contractor you need to trust the pipeline and you need to be sure whether your code hit production or not since it’s critical in issue management.

Re: Ask HN: What is the first thing you implement at a new company?

#30

Linting and code style guidelines. Easy to introduce, but makes a big positive difference.

I did this at my current / new assignment, turned out eslint was running but it was skipping tests, and it ran over the dist folder (e.g. minified code), annnd it didn't run with the --cache flag. Brought the runtime down from ??? (didn't wait for it to finish) to 30s to 2-3s, and it made thousands of minor inconsistency fixes. It was appreciated, thankfully, :p.
Post reply on HN