Absolute truths I unlearned as junior developer

Post by sirmarksalot » Fri, Jun 07, 2019, 10:27 PM UTC

kbp wrote: post #378

Tade0 wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's what happened to me(A) and a friend(B) from a former workplace of mine(open-source project): B: Take a look at this shit code that I found. A: Whoah, it really is shit. Blame it so that we can see what kind of genious is behind this. B: ... A: Well? B: Apparently you wrote and I reviewed/approved it.

The "who wrote this?" mentality is a trap that's good to avoid. Get comfortable with different ways of writing something that, while they might have different tradeoffs, accomplish the same thing, and try to see past that. Understand that most code wasn't written by anybody--lines 1 and 3 were written by Alice a year ago, line 2 was written by Bob 2 years ago, and line 4 was written by Alice yesterday. `git blame` is…

Post by bluejellybean » Fri, Jun 07, 2019, 10:32 PM UTC

airnomad wrote: post #345

bluejellybean wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a hiring perspective, the problem is, and will continue to be, the quality of each worker. Although there are a handful of similarities between how the two professions operate, I think that it is unwise to make the factory worker connotation. The entire idea of a factory worker is that they can be swapped in place by another and the output is maintained to a great extent. This just simply isn't the case in softw…

That's because our tools are not good enough so what we lack in tools we compensate by individual developer quality. I spend a lot of time within WordPress ecosystem and I've seen people coming to me with 20K products shops they've built and maintain without a single line of code written. I've seen companies operating online without having any developments either on contract or in house. Because for certain simpler s…

Post by kraftman » Fri, Jun 07, 2019, 10:33 PM UTC

perfunctory wrote: post #414

> So imagine my surprise when I showed up at my first day on the job at a startup and found no tests at all. No tests in the frontend. No tests in the backend. Just, no tests. > Nada. Zip. Null. Undefined. NaN tests. On my current project I have 100% test code coverage. Which I believe is quite unusual. But I am pretty sure that if I give a talk about how I did it, most people will be horrified.

Post by chimpburger » Fri, Jun 07, 2019, 10:33 PM UTC

gridlockd wrote: post #51

taneq wrote: post #7

The big one for me was the realisation that the code doesn't matter . I mean sure, it does, to us. It's what we do. But really, code doesn't matter. To the end user, what matters is that we solve their problem. We let them do their job, and we make that job as easy as possible. And that's what they pay us for. And to the company we work for, what matters is that we solve the end user's problem, and that we do so in a…

> To the end user, what matters is that we solve their problem. We let them do their job, and we make that job as easy as possible. And that's what they pay us for. If your code quality is bad, you can't do that efficiently. Your developers will hate their jobs and churn like crazy. And by "bad quality" I don't mean "not unit tested" or "not commented" or "poorly formatted". I'm talking about code that is difficult t…

Post by james_s_tayler » Fri, Jun 07, 2019, 10:38 PM UTC