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Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high?

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Re: Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high?

#301

Post by kirubakaran »

PeterisP wrote: post #296
kirubakaran wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. While I'm a big proponent of "as simple as possible", often when people say "x is overkill", they mean "I don't know x" (where x != k8s of course).

Thing is, it really changes the equation of whether it's worth or not. If you or some other senior engineer knows X, then perhaps they can implement X in an hour and things remain simple. If your team does not know X, then it will take a week to learn X, understand it, try it out on a toy project and implement it in production (which alone might make it an overkill, because it's not worth a week) and it becomes quite…

The GP of my comment says:

> Me as a manager at a startup: "Do not install Terraform. Finish the import prototype... now."

The team knows Terraform. The manager probably does not. I was responding to that.

Re: Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high?

#302

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

tjansen wrote: post #227
OldHand2018 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 20 years ago, having none of these basics was almost the norm I guess I worked at one of the best then. It still went out of business.

I just read the almost 20 year old Joel Test page for the first time in a long while and I was surprised by what it didn't contain. For example, it doesn't even mention unit tests. Which is no real surprise, because JUnit itself is only 23 years old. Things like code coverage tools didn't exist back then. And while there were some early tools for automated builds, like Mozilla Tinderbox, setting them up was a real ch…

Unit tests are definitely plenty old.

I think that maybe folks aren't quite clear on what "Unit Test" means.

Nowadays, "unit test" means a test written into an existing test harness system, like JUnit or XCTest (what I use).

In fact, I was writing unit tests for PHP-based Web apps and C++-based Mac software more than twenty years ago. I just had to write my own framework.

Even nowadays, I sometimes write my own framework. For example on my [hopefully] last PHP project, I designed a SaaS-type system, and eschewed PHPUnit; mostly because it would need some special installation that might be beyond the ken of the target users. Instead, I wrote my own test harness system, and it worked great. It wasn't a crazy amount of extra work. I always create massive tests, anyway, so it wasn't that big a deal.

For my Apple/Swift work, I rely on XCTest, which is a perfectly acceptable test harness.

I'm pretty sure that unit tests were mentioned in Writing Solid Code, which is almost 30 years old.

Re: Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high?

#303

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

rrradical wrote: post #194
Random_ernest wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some years I was the developer you talk about, who always knew everything better, now I am a manager at a startup. So I was able to see both sides of the discussion. I feel like it always comes down to a communication issue. Team members need to feel heard, and feel acknowledged that you fully understood what they are suggesting. On the other hand they need to understand that there are constraints that force a de…

A coworker introduced me to the concept of a 'novelty budget', and I find it really useful. If my team is taking on a new project, there are many ways to improve on how things have been done in the past. But doing anything new carries some risk. If every part of the project is new, it will be very risky. So I use the idea of a novelty budget to negotiate with my engineers. "What things do you really want to change? L…

I like that!

"Novelty Budget"

Re: Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high?

#304

Post by p_l »

rileymat2 wrote: post #268
p_l wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends. Is it the crazy religious TDD where you somehow are supposed to write tests before writing any code, despite the fact that you're making exploratory code ? TDD works best when you have figured out what to test for, unfortunately more than once I encountered people who wanted to write tests for exploratory code, in rigid TDD like environment. (sidenote: It's possible to do kind-of TDD with exploratory code in…

I have only toyed with it on personal projects. But that is kind of a misrepresentation from what a lot of them propose. You typically will not be writing more than a part of a test, just enough to get it to fail, before writing the code. It can work good as a built in driver to exercise the code you are trying to write as you go. It also gives you a chance to test the interfaces to the code you are making as you go…

That's why I mentioned "crazy religious". I've seen it got that far in real world, which warps TDD to the point where a good technique is thrown away by people disgusted with the pushed purity message.

It doesn't help that often, even otherwise good material about TDD, didn't really talk about cases like exploratory coding - working from messing around in a REPL, formalizing the code into TDD skeletons, is pretty powerful method, but isn't (wasn't?) mentioned often when I learnt the most about TDD (granted, that was 2005-2015)

Re: Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high?

#305

Post by p_l »

partomniscient wrote: post #187
p_l wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except the people who did the "tape it together"? Those were the same people who made the long process before. That's why they could just tape it together, they were deep in the knowledge of the system they were fixing and thus could tape a kludge together to get them back.

But that's because in those days the people that built the thing have to do production support once it goes live. That doesn't happen so much in larger organisations because they have separate teams divided along "add/build something new" and "keep it going" boundaries without a lot of cross-pollination.

There's also the difference between building bottom up with full knowledge of what you built, like the Apollo program team had (even if they bought something externally, the people who made it were available to the team, and/or the team studied the items in depth).

And then there's modern world of slapping together libraries that are often not known, sometimes with closed source, sometimes without real documentation. I've had to use disassembler in the past to access framework we were supposed to use...

Re: Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high?

#306

Post by mattalbie »

zests wrote: post #105

Near the start of my career I was at a small/medium sized company on a tiny engineering team (3.5 people). We also had a lot of responsibility. Naturally we did the only thing we could and formed silos and worked in our individual silos without too much regard for testing or pull requests. We had a lot of communication and I personally owned the "back-end" and was able to ship stuff fast. I knew how every piece of co…

I don’t even work in software and find this all too familiar. Too many small companies are like this.
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