Everyone "owns" the code. Then there's the guy you go to when it fails.
Helps to document things, so you at least have something to throw at people when they come asking.
Ask HN: How do you handle code ownership?
21–30 of 68 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you handle code ownership?
#22It's usually a bad idea to have code "owners". Yes, sometimes someone will know the most about a specific piece of code if either they wrote it or worked on it a lot. Sometimes people will not want to touch a piece of code. My rule is that once you submit the code for review and it passes and gets merged everybody owns the code. Everybody. The person who is modifying the code has the responsibility to identify the be…
Some people have claimed that in my organization. I think that can work for library code, and particularly libraries that are used in many different places. But once you're talking about a service, or code that is only used by one service, then you need to have an owner (or a team of owners). If you still think there's no owner, then ask yourself who is going to get woken up at 2AM when it breaks, and that's your own…
the team owns the code. the whole team. whoever is oncall gets to wake up at 3am if there is an issue.
Re: Ask HN: How do you handle code ownership?
#231. I don't say "guys", I say "folks" 2. Code is owned by teams of people and not individuals.
According to dictionary.com, the definition of "guys" is "persons of either sex; people" The definition of "folks" is "people in general" I'm not sure what point you are trying to make here.
https://msmagazine.com/2013/09/06/a-guy-is-a-man-is-a-guy/
> Thought Experiment #1: Imagine a room full of men and women. Someone stands at the front and says, “I want all the guys to stand up.” What happens next?
I don't know where I personally land on this debate, but the points are cogent.
Re: Ask HN: How do you handle code ownership?
#24In our case, teams don't own projects/code-bases, they own "features" and "releases".
About 67% of our code is some form of Ruby - some of it Rails, some of it custom Ruby code running in Kubernetes+Docker processing data.
The other 33% of our code is Rust - and not just service side code but Rust that has to run on multiple platforms with varying deep operating systems knowledge.
My team generally owns Features and Releases related to the Rust code because two of the three members are OS programmers by experience. That said, we don't exclusively work on the Rust code and sometimes wander into the Ruby code base.
Similarly, other teams occasionally need to update the Rust code to generate some new data - a lot of that is pretty basic stuff and doesn't require deep OS knowledge. So they'll make changes there.
Since our stack is so heterogenous, it's hard to have everyone work on everything. However, from what I know of most companies outside Apple/MSFT/Google/etc, they're gonna fall in the "we own web services" where the only real bifurcation will be "frontend code" and then "middle-to-backend code". Maybe throw in some apps as well.
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Now all of that said - the reason we went to teams owning "features" and "releases" was to push folks to not be possessive of code. Stuff changes and it changes quickly, so there's not much use trying to isolate folks. Document gratuitously, test heavily, and refactor often.
Re: Ask HN: How do you handle code ownership?
#251. I don't say "guys", I say "folks" 2. Code is owned by teams of people and not individuals.
According to dictionary.com, the definition of "guys" is "persons of either sex; people" The definition of "folks" is "people in general" I'm not sure what point you are trying to make here.
I think "guys" is gendered and using a non-gendered word is better when referring to a group of people.
Re: Ask HN: How do you handle code ownership?
#26We struggle with this question where I work and there is some toxicity.
I've been wondering if you could add a comment to the top of files to indicate ownership (//owners:someTeam, someGuy). Then your CI could parse the modified files and require a review from a team and/or send a notification to said user.
Re: Ask HN: How do you handle code ownership?
#271. I don't say "guys", I say "folks" 2. Code is owned by teams of people and not individuals.
According to dictionary.com, the definition of "guys" is "persons of either sex; people" The definition of "folks" is "people in general" I'm not sure what point you are trying to make here.
I like the counter-example: "How many guys have you dated?"
Still gender-neutral?
Re: Ask HN: How do you handle code ownership?
#281. I don't say "guys", I say "folks" 2. Code is owned by teams of people and not individuals.
1. Congratulations!
2. Agreed.
Re: Ask HN: How do you handle code ownership?
#29git blame
hum.. person left.
recode my way around that code so the new feature works and I'm not tagged as the owner by future git blames.
/sarcasm. I think.
Re: Ask HN: How do you handle code ownership?
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
According to dictionary.com, the definition of "guys" is "persons of either sex; people" The definition of "folks" is "people in general" I'm not sure what point you are trying to make here.
https://msmagazine.com/2013/09/06/a-guy-is-a-man-is-a-guy/ > Thought Experiment #1: Imagine a room full of men and women. Someone stands at the front and says, “I want all the guys to stand up.” What happens next? I don't know where I personally land on this debate, but the points are cogent.
Experiment #2: Someone says, "OK, I want you guys to stand up." with no particular emphasis on any word or looking at particular people. Did something different happen? I think that's closer to the original post's usage. If you say it the way it's naturally said instead of the strawman way in this article, it's not explicitly gendered or exclusive, maybe just a little implicitly. Reason enough to dispose with it I guess, but let's argue from reality not a made-up caricature.