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Software engineering topics I changed my mind on

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Re: Software engineering topics I changed my mind on

#561

Post by [deleted] »

mabbo wrote: post #480
lillecarl wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the upside of a higly diversified worksforce? Where I work we're all white males age 20-60 except accounting, they're white females around age 30. What's bad about this? What value does it bring to diversify, what should we look for and why is it important? Or are we too small to need diversifying yet with only about 30 employees?

If you don't see the value in having a diverse workforce and company at any scale, I doubt anything I can say will convince you. There's enough research out there showing the benefits, if you're willing to take just a few minutes to go look for it. Your competitors will read that research. edit: carlhjerpe is right- this is super condescending. Downvote me.

[deleted]

Re: Software engineering topics I changed my mind on

#562

Post by TheCoelacanth »

nielsbot wrote: post #358
rmk wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People with less experience consistently undervalue linting and code formatting and style. Code linting forces one to deal with code smells and innocuous errors that can cost a lot to fix once they escape into the field. Consistent code formatting and style are invaluable in (a) reducing cognitive load in picking names, which is a hard problem in computer science, (b) clarifying the structure of the code (you begin t…

Opinion: but I think "invaluable" is overstating it. I agree with OP: not that important. Again, opinion. (20 years experience here) Edit: I suppose I should clarify why. I think there are more important issues to focus on when building software with others.

I think the value is modest, but since the cost is essentially zero, it's a no-brainer to use it.

Re: Software engineering topics I changed my mind on

#563

Post by submeta »

> People who stress over code style, linting rules, or other minutia are insane weirdos

He seem to have not seen messed up code written and changed by a dozen programmers over the course of years with various notions about indenting, placing parentheses and comments and whatnot. I‘ve seen code with tabs and spaces mixed, wrongly indented code where following the logic is hard, code with no comments at all or code with more comments than code.

Don‘t give any guidelines and you‘ll end up with a mess.

Re: Software engineering topics I changed my mind on

#564

Post by ProZsolt »

OJFord wrote: post #428
ozim wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should be, but not everyone on the team has to be confident. Not everyone has to be outspoken, not everyone has to have perfect pronunciation. Not everyone is able to structure their thoughts in 1 minute, even though they are able to work on complex systems. What you want from "what you did yesterday, blockers, what you will do today" script is a framework for conversation starter, conversation scope and having so…

Personally I'd like a stand-up where it's ok not to have anything to say, like yeah, WIP, no problems, no blockers (except being here talking about it instead of doing it..!) etc. Fully agree I would prefer it later. Not just 20min, I typically start ~1h before ours anyway, but it hangs over me all that time. I'd like to spend most of the day working on something and then stand-up in the afternoon, I'd be more likely…

Yeah having standup in the afternoon is great. At my last company I worked with Americans from the EU. My standup was at ~4pm. My "last day's work" was still fresh and still had ~2 hours to resolve blockers.

Re: Software engineering topics I changed my mind on

#565

Post by xorcist »

orobinson wrote: post #316
Shorel wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are only two options for me: MySQL or Postgres. And using AWS generally means using Aurora. Then the choice is already made. Not hard at all. Yep, my work involves heavy use of SQL and I find it better than the NoSQL insanity.

Just curious, for what reasons would you choose MySQL over Postgres?

Traditionally it was because you needed replication or sharding that you didn't have to boil half an ocean for, or at least half decent full text indices. These days however I believe the differences are smaller and in other areas.

Most often, you choose a database because of what you application supports and is tested with, not the other way around. Or what your other applications already use. Complete green fields aren't all that common.

Re: Software engineering topics I changed my mind on

#566

Post by ric2b »

jmiserez wrote: post #442
Falkon1313 wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally agree. But static analysis tools are still pretty dumb and sometimes cause extra work to no benefit. Flagging a method for cyclomatic complexity when it uses a case statement that is blatantly obvious and simple to any human seeing it, for example. Or just happening to notice a bunch of issues in file B when you commit file A but didn't even touch file B. Overall it's good, I like it, but with the caveat…

Cyclomatic complexity IMHO isn't a good metric for code complexity as understood by humans, but sometimes it can be insightful especially when it's unexpected. My favorite static analysis issues are the ones that flip-flop between two issues, I love doing "merge this if statement with the enclosing one" only to get "expressions should not be too complex" after I've merged them. As long as you have the power as the de…

> ones that flip-flop between two issues, I love doing "merge this if statement with the enclosing one" only to get "expressions should not be too complex" after I've merged them.

I'm not sure that's flip-floping, the solution to the overly complex expression is to turn into a function.

Unless the tool is just being overly aggressive on what it considers too complex, in that case you can try to tweak the configuration instead.

Re: Software engineering topics I changed my mind on

#567

Post by dijit »

lillecarl wrote: post #465
mabbo wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If a good developer you know, recommends someone they worked with: It's almost an instant hire. But for the rest, yeah, it's incredibly tough. A talk I watched recently by Ijeoma Oluo made a point I had never considered before: statistically, most people refer friends, and most friends are of a similar background, race, culture, gender, etc. It's not intentional- people aren't going out of their way to only refer p…

What is the upside of a higly diversified worksforce? Where I work we're all white males age 20-60 except accounting, they're white females around age 30. What's bad about this? What value does it bring to diversify, what should we look for and why is it important? Or are we too small to need diversifying yet with only about 30 employees?

It depends.

I’m famously non-PC, but there are certainly scenarios where diversity is actually a large benefit.

If you are making a product, it makes sense to have a diverse team working on it so that it had the broadest appeal or usability- Apple Watch not identifying the heart rate of black people and the Facebook image identifier misclassifying black people as monkeys being the most famous or prominent examples.

Re: Software engineering topics I changed my mind on

#568

Post by azemetre »

tribaal wrote: post #371
Shorel wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I find a whiteboard a bit more intimidating. It kind of implies performing your writings in public. A notebook is a very personal thing. =)

I recently switched from a very whiteboard/paper heavy workflow to using a reMarkable tablet. Holy shit this thing is good. It's like an infinite notepad/whiteboard that auto syncs to the cloud, lets you define page layout templates, and renders PDFs and ebooks. I've had it for just a few weeks and it's already the favorite pice of tech I own.

I use a rocketbook [1] to do something similar. They recently came out with a legal pad version and I love it. It's a little more work to convert notes into PDFs (have to manually take a picture) but it's a cheaper solution.

I've never used a reMarkable tablet but there's something off putting for me about using tablets to take physical notes. IDK how to explain it, drawing apps are fine but physically writing symbols, or making charts, or writing notes? It just feels off. I like the rocketbooks because it's just a fancier way to implement OCR for handwritten notes and the actions between paper and their product is nearly identical for me.

Maybe the reMarkable is able to handle this, just never tried it. It does look better than using something like an iPad for note taking.

[1] https://getrocketbook.com/

Re: Software engineering topics I changed my mind on

#569

Post by omosubi »

submeta wrote: post #563

> People who stress over code style, linting rules, or other minutia are insane weirdos He seem to have not seen messed up code written and changed by a dozen programmers over the course of years with various notions about indenting, placing parentheses and comments and whatnot. I‘ve seen code with tabs and spaces mixed, wrongly indented code where following the logic is hard, code with no comments at all or code wit…

As far as I can tell he isn't arguing for not giving any guidelines, but rather that arguing over them is pointless. choose a set and be done with it.
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