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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?

#51

Post by mirceal »

pmiller2 wrote: post #35
mirceal wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If you have 20M lines of code you hopefully have more than 1 team and you also hopefully have more than one service w/ the right interfaces/apis between them.

As unrealistic as it sound, yes, if you're oncall you need to be able to understand the problem and fix it/mitigate it at 3am. This opens another can of worms around what is worth of a 3am page and how development, deployment and monitoring should be done but if you wake me up I should be empowered to do something about it

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

#52

Post by kraftman »

Domenic_S wrote: post #23
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.

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.

I think there's a distinction between 'you guys' and 'the guys', just like there's a difference between 'my baby' and 'the baby' in songs. If I said 'I want you guys to all stand up' I would expect everyone to stand up, if I said 'I want all the guys to stand up' I would expect only males to stand.

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

#53

Post by mirceal »

breischl wrote: post #31
mirceal wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

nope. you need to know how the thing that you're responsible for works. no exceptions.

what you can have is an interface to another service/team that represents the boundary of your service. When shit breaks and you isolate the breakage to this dependency you wake them up (preferably you detect and you raise this automatically). bonus point if you thought about this as you were building your stuff and your service can work in degraded mode while the thing is solved.

owners for services if okay as long as owner == team. if owner == individual you're doomed + people owning critical things will hate you and their job.

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

#54

Post by mirceal »

blablabla123 wrote: post #36
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.

yeah. the 10x-er usually play the role of wrecking havoc and after that the 0.1x-ers usually clean it up and stabilize it. If you're in that situation you need to get to greener pasture after you've put a reasonable amount of effort into explaining why this is bad + trying to raise awareness

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

#55

Post by RiderOfGiraffes »

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.

That's what dictionary.com says, and that's true in some places, but in other places "guys" is definitely gendered.

Imagine a group of cishet men saying : "I'm off to the strip club to see a bunch of guys taking their clothes off and dancing in a provocative manner."

Does that seem reasonable? If not, then the term "guys" is gendered.

On top of that, most of the women I know feel that "guys" is a term that excludes them. That's enough for me to avoid using it.

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

#56

Post by elpakal »

gwbas1c wrote: post #40
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.

and what if you don't use GitHub?

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

#57

Post by blablabla123 »

mirceal wrote: post #54
blablabla123 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

yeah. the 10x-er usually play the role of wrecking havoc and after that the 0.1x-ers usually clean it up and stabilize it. If you're in that situation you need to get to greener pasture after you've put a reasonable amount of effort into explaining why this is bad + trying to raise awareness

Not sure if this matches my definition of 10x-er ;) No, but there is certainly some truth to it, those who routinely push a lot of code tend to be less stringent on following best practices. I think it's smart to keep changesets small but efficient without being neither too pedantic nor too sloppy. After all coding should still be a fun activity, even with all these crazy processes in place...

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

#58

Post by catchmeifyoucan »

tacostakohashi wrote: post #13

In my experience with several big organizations (20,000+ employees), they tend to have a home-grown application to track ownership of resources (assets) - including source code (repositories), and servers, databases, scheduled jobs (in autosys or suchlike). Generally each of these entities is grouped into some bucket for an application / "system" / business area, and then that bucket has a few owners assigned, and al…

Where do you work?

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

#60

Post by breischl »

nilkn wrote: post #41
breischl wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dictionary definition aside, the colloquial meaning of "guys" is quite frequently "men". I think the GP was trying to be gender-neutral. I actually have tried to move to "folks" myself for that reason.

It depends on how the word is used. "You guys" is very different, for instance, than just "guys". As it happens, that's the usage in the title of this thread. I'm not saying there's no reason to reconsider language choices. Frankly, I agree overall that this phrase and its derivatives should probably be slowly retired, if only to avoid the occasional confusion. My point is only that even in colloquial usage there are…

>My point is only that even in colloquial usage there are patterns involving "guys" that are clearly gender-neutral at this point and have been for decades.

Yeah, that's fair. I think we can agree that the meaning is ambiguous.

TBH I just figure that "folks" is a change that might, in some cases, make some people feel more welcome, at basically no expense in time, effort or clarity. Seems like a decent cost/benefit to me. But I don't get up in arms about it - this thread notwithstanding. ;)

And now I'm tired of talking about this. :)

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