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Ask HN: How do you handle code ownership?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you handle code ownership?

#31

Post by breischl »

mirceal wrote: post #22
breischl wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That works OK-ish for small organizations. When you have 1000 engineers, or even 100, it is no longer feasible to have a single on-caller who can keep up with changes enough to debug every system, much less the multiple on-callers you need in order to have an on-call rotation.

IME even in small organizations (<20 engineers) it's very easy to end up not knowing enough to debug everything, and your on-caller basically becomes a smart router. ie, they can debug enough to figure out that it's a DB problem, and then wake up the DB guy. This becomes really annoying for the on-caller, so there's an impetus to have more focused paging groups, and now you're back to having owners for services.

Re: Ask HN: How do you handle code ownership?

#32

Post by hitekker »

breischl wrote: post #17
mirceal wrote: post #11

It'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…

For those looking for a deeper look into the subject (and are not self-deceiving about human nature in groups) I heartily recommend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_responsibility

Re: Ask HN: How do you handle code ownership?

#33

Post by bargl »

NickBusey wrote: post #12
jgrahamc wrote: post #8

1. 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.

The same could have been said about the word "man" a long time ago.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/Man

>Old English used wer and wif to distinguish the sexes, but wer began to disappear late 13c. and was replaced by man.

It would be pretty awesome if we'd kept to the wer/wif tradition. It'd make modern conversations a ton easier. Also, I'm fully onboard with calling males wermen or werman.

Final note, a female werewolf would be a wifwolf.

Sorry to totally geek out but I just wanted to point out the fluidity of definitions.

Re: Ask HN: How do you handle code ownership?

#34

Post by jfk13 »

d4mi3n wrote: post #20
NickBusey wrote: post #12

Earlier 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.

There’s an ongoing debate on “guys” being non-inclusive. I don’t personally buy into it, but that doesn’t make it an invalid position. I generally recommend calling people what they want to be called and exercising common courtesy.

There's certainly a history of "guys" being used specifically for men, as in "Guys and Dolls"; however, there is also an (increasing, I think) acceptance of its use in reference to mixed or even all-female groups. But not everyone is equally comfortable with that usage.

In many contexts I think it should be clear enough whether an inclusive or gender-specific meaning is intended, but some people may prefer to avoid any risk of misunderstanding by choosing a different word.

And unfortunately, as seems all to common these days, some may choose to see offence where none was intended.

Re: Ask HN: How do you handle code ownership?

#35

Post by pmiller2 »

mirceal wrote: post #22
breischl wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What happens when you have 2M or 20M lines of code floating around? Is every engineer expected to know enough to fix (or at least patch) any issue at 3 am?

Re: Ask HN: How do you handle code ownership?

#36

Post by blablabla123 »

mirceal wrote: post #11

It'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…

That's the beauty of code review, it gets also checked for maintainability and whether it's a code style everybody accepts. It's also possible without code review but that requires much more things to be in place.

Nothing is more frustrating than a single person pushing code that the other devs don't agree on and do have to fix/maintain actually.

Re: Ask HN: How do you handle code ownership?

#39

Post by bargl »

scintill76 wrote: post #30
Domenic_S wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gu…

This is a really good point. The usage of the term really ads clarity to it's usage.

You guys - gender neutral. The guys - gender specific.

I think a lot of people who are annoyed by the term guys don't like the fact that there is a word that has both gender neutral and gender specific definitions being used as gender neutral.

Dudes is another one.

Spanish has an explanation for this (which i think is what people are frustrated by).

Ellos => them male Ellas => them female Ellos => a group of 10 women with one man in the bunch

Re: Ask HN: How do you handle code ownership?

#40

Post by gwbas1c »

elpakal wrote: post #26

We 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.

Github has the code owners feature. A pull request can't be merged until all the owners approve.
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