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My favourite is when you're a solopreneur working in your own repos and still asking yourself "who wrote this shit?!"
I heard a saying once: "all developers should be embarrassed about code they wrote more than a year ago" as a (cheeky) measure of ongoing growth and development. :-)
EDIT: Actually I feel like an aging chess GM -- better than younger at strategy, worse than younger at tactics.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I heard a saying once: "all developers should be embarrassed about code they wrote more than a year ago" as a (cheeky) measure of ongoing growth and development. :-)
If you think of your own thoughts in the past and cringe, then your brain has grown since then.
I'm in a constant state of this in the codebase I inherited. The previous solo front-end developer was the manager of R&D so he couldn't be fired easily, he was the only person willing and sort of able to do front-end (PHP + JS/Dojo), he was super productive (most code was written in 2012/2013), but not a very competent or self-critical developer. Think a back-end that concatenates XML into a big global string over t…
This is the danger of rewrites (assuming this was not actually greenlit as a 10 year project)!
We pine for the perfect green field where all things are good but there are probably zero companies where all developers are expert, where the solutions are all unique and unambiguous, where the trade-off between maintainability/performance and speed of coding are all completely set in stone, where nothing has ever changed in strategy, framework, etc. where no framework update has ever broken something and needed some dirty hack to work around it, where you don't have managers come and go who are not 100% helpful or useful.
So better to look forwards always. Don't try and fix what is there unless it needs changing to move forwards. A lot of the code I have wanted to rewrite in my current company will be toast in the next 2 years as we are writing new apps so just don't lose sleep over it.
Feel like there has been increasingly more cuss / inappropriate words showing up on top page of HN. I recommend HN to my kids. Not that they are not exposed to these words online but I would rather not come this from their parent. Not sure how to feel.
This is a pretty entitled comment. I'd suggest that if you don't want kids to read the word "shit" you keep them off the Internet entirely for life rather than running around trying to impose your morality on everyone else.
In my first corporate job out of college (a NOC at an ISP) I was asked to update the documentation for troubleshooting quality of service issues. I checked our wiki for what was already there and it horrendous. I started to mentally thrash the person and was going to go confront them about it. When I checked the edit history I was greeted by a single edit and my username a week after I started the job. I learned a gr…
I've subsequently noticed that those who are quickest to talk trash about nuanced engineering decisions and minor bugs are often the ones with the most fundamentally-indefensible coding practices (5000-line source files that throw innumerable compiler warnings, using deprecated frameworks, explicit silent failure modes, etc). Latent insecurity is a very real phenomenon.
My favourite is when you're a solopreneur working in your own repos and still asking yourself "who wrote this shit?!"