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Good code is like a love letter to the next developer who will maintain it

addyosmani.com

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Re: Good code is like a love letter to the next developer who will maintain it

#41

Post by webdood90 »

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #31
Arisaka1 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Yesterday I ran into a job opening asking for "Java developer who delivers 3x faster than the other developers" in one of the bullet points. It's such a weird point to emphasize that you want speed with no concern to trade-offs, and the maintainability and scalability of the codebase will be the first victims sooner or later.

My personal experience is that the majority of developers I ever encounter at work (as opposed to within my social network) are usually slow because they're bad engineers who don't understand problems quickly, don't have the knowledge or experience to see solutions quickly, and in general don't think deeply quickly. It's not hard to 3x performance without sacrifices when the baseline is mediocre at best. "Fast must b…

> the majority of developers I ever encounter at work are usually slow because they're bad engineers

hm, something about this that I just can't put my thumb on

Re: Good code is like a love letter to the next developer who will maintain it

#42

Post by mikepurvis »

Arisaka1 wrote: post #16
ThalesX wrote: post #12

Sorry next developer, I'm on a tight deadline, used to love this craft, now I just do what the product people tell me to get a nice paycheck.

Yep. Yesterday I ran into a job opening asking for "Java developer who delivers 3x faster than the other developers" in one of the bullet points. It's such a weird point to emphasize that you want speed with no concern to trade-offs, and the maintainability and scalability of the codebase will be the first victims sooner or later.

"You'll get to work on a codebase for whom the entire development mindset has been 3x-speed-at-all-costs."

Yeah..... pass.

Re: Good code is like a love letter to the next developer who will maintain it

#43

Post by dools »

beebmam wrote: post #15

In my opinion, good code is like a Brita filter. It does its job, will one day need to be replaced, and it should be easy to replace. More importantly: metaphors are not a healthy way to understand an idea. Ideas are more nuanced than a metaphor could possibly account for. Abstaining from metaphors might not make for a catchy headline though.

The headline is a simile.

Re: Good code is like a love letter to the next developer who will maintain it

#45

Post by henning »

dear future developer, nothing matters and code will still be hard to read even if I try my very hardest to make it as good as i can. the world is dying and we are doing our best to kill it. you having a hard time understanding my code is not really anything that can be fixed. it pales in comparison with the actual problems the world faces. tough it out or rewrite it. sorry

Re: Good code is like a love letter to the next developer who will maintain it

#46

Post by bena »

beebmam wrote: post #15

In my opinion, good code is like a Brita filter. It does its job, will one day need to be replaced, and it should be easy to replace. More importantly: metaphors are not a healthy way to understand an idea. Ideas are more nuanced than a metaphor could possibly account for. Abstaining from metaphors might not make for a catchy headline though.

I think the issue you may have with metaphors is that people tend to argue the metaphor rather than engage with the concept.

Arguing the metaphor is pointless, because the metaphor isn’t the thing, it’s just a way to explain an aspect of the thing.

Re: Good code is like a love letter to the next developer who will maintain it

#47

Post by Smoosh »

commandlinefan wrote: post #6

As much as bad code irritates me, I'm not quite so quick to blame the original maintainer - they may well have wanted, badly, to write something better, but been put under artificial (and usually meaningless) time pressure that didn't allow it.

I maintain mainframe systems and very often I would like to restructure code to improve it, but the requirement is to make the most minimal change that achieves the fix or change required. Mostly because the code is 30 years of patches and minimal changes which is not well documented and is extremely fragile and not well understood.

Re: Good code is like a love letter to the next developer who will maintain it

#48

Post by screye »

webdood90 wrote: post #41
BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal experience is that the majority of developers I ever encounter at work (as opposed to within my social network) are usually slow because they're bad engineers who don't understand problems quickly, don't have the knowledge or experience to see solutions quickly, and in general don't think deeply quickly. It's not hard to 3x performance without sacrifices when the baseline is mediocre at best. "Fast must b…

> the majority of developers I ever encounter at work are usually slow because they're bad engineers hm, something about this that I just can't put my thumb on

"Majority of people who drown cannot swim."

Re: Good code is like a love letter to the next developer who will maintain it

#49

Post by majikandy »

rpastuszak wrote: post #21

1) "Code sober, debug drunk" It's harder to read the code than to write it so if you can barely comprehend the thing you just wrote, you probably won't understand it in the future: https://sonnet.io/posts/code-sober-debug-drunk/ 2) I think it's more like speaking with ghosts (including a spoiler for The Sixth Sense): https://sonnet.io/posts/emotive-conjugation/

>it’s harder to read code that to write it

Isn’t this only true of bad code? Good code is almost certainly the other way round, harder to write than read… just like a really good book was much harder for the author than it was for you, the reader.

Re: Good code is like a love letter to the next developer who will maintain it

#50

Post by ugh123 »

Meh. I've seen teams and projects bogged down by "good clean code" rules and nit picking code reviewers. These folks, typically "staff" engineers, over-police the repos and care more about clean code than delivery and execution.

I'm waiting for the day where AI/co-pilots can enforce team and industry best-practices, style, maintainability, testability, etc before the code is even committed.

Call it "uber-linting" and get rid of code reviews.

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