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

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

#71

Post by yorwba »

leksak wrote: post #12
apfel912 wrote: post #7

CI/CD Dockerize all the things

Where do you stop short? I'm conflicted. I sometimes look at Docker and am like "this is great", but I also sometimes look at a plethora of Dockerfiles and I'm like... what are we doing wrong? Do you, for instance, Dockerize small Python tools (or similar)? How well does this work? I remember one project where we had tons of small Pipenv projects and one pain was that a few were Python 3.5 and a few others were Pytho…

> we had tons of small Pipenv projects and one pain was that a few were Python 3.5 and a few others were Python 3.6

Isn't pipenv supposed to take care of that? You pipenv run the tool and it's automatically executed in the right virtual environment.

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

#73

Post by isostatic »

aetherspawn wrote: post #40
macht wrote: post #34

I go from git to SVN. It's just easier for me to work with and once the team gets used to it, it's a win-win.

SVN is really heavyweight for branches and tags. It used to take like a minute to branch with SVN but when we swapped to git it took like less than a blink. Also —rebase is way better than merge. I haven’t had to merge git for over 6 months but with SVN I was doing it twice daily, at least.

We used to have a large (>20GB) svn repository, I never noticed tags (which was part of the build process) taking any time, certainly sub-second.

However the branching process in svn is a right pain, if you work in branches. Depends on what your code is if you need the overhead and risk of branches I guess.

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

#74

Post by pjmorris »

fastbeef wrote: 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…

'Everything got the way it is one logical step at a time' - paraphrase of some of Gerald Weinberg's advice in 'The Secrets of Consulting'

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

#75

Post by Geee »

nelsonic wrote: post #51

#tl;dr Regardless of how long you stay with a company/team always leave it better than you found it. Requirements Gathering, Paper Prototype, MVP, UX-testing, Docs, Tests, Linting, Static Analysis, Git/GitHub Workflow, Team/Personal Learning, Code Quality, CI/CD, Pipelines. #longform Assuming the company is new to me but has already been writing/shipping code for before I arrive ... I ask clarifying questions to get…

Thanks, I'm going to implement these in my company.

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

#77

Post by tasuki »

systemtest wrote: post #45
colinbartlett wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My opinion is that every team member should have the same editor with the same settings. The settings should be easily accessible from Confluence or a similar knowledge base.

I can see why everyone should use the same settings, but am not sure why everyone should use the same editor.

An easy way to sync formatting: https://editorconfig.org/

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

#78

Post by hurryharry »

astonex wrote: post #26

If you just arrived at a company why are you pushing to change anything. They obviously already have a working process and you should be careful to change anything that works, especially when you may not yet know all of the more hidden details.

I second this - there is so much to absorb when joining a new team/company. Absorb as much as you can about process in place. Ask plenty of questions. So I would suggest to setup few meetings with right people just to get thigns in place.

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

#79

Post by ThePadawan »

dboreham wrote: post #55
phoenix24 wrote: post #4

CI/CD. Revision Control. Artifactory. VPN.

VPN?? For what?

Not parent, but generally to be able to do remote work.

Production goes down and you're not at the office (1h travel)? Now even a 1min fix will cause 1h + 1min of downtime.

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

#80

Post by gwbas1c »

I try to understand what the real problems are, and if there is the will to fix them. Then I try to understand the real social hierarchy and everyone's biases.

In the last two jobs I've started, both had serious problems from using an ORM framework and dependency injection framework incorrectly. In one company, the project ended up going nowhere because of incorrect biases towards using a database. In the other company, everyone knew that if they didn't fix the problem, they'd go out of business.

I left the company that didn't want to fix its code, and still work at the company that fixed its ORM and dependency injection problems.

[Edit] The project that went nowhere failed because the lead programmers didn't know how to use a database. They wrapped it with layers of frameworks and code generators. The layers took so much time to work with that the schedule dragged out, and we missed our market opportunity. There was no will to fix the real problems, so ultimately I knew I had no future at the company.

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