191–200 of 361 posts
At some point you will discover the Right Way to program, the thing which makes this all make sense, and you'll be convinced that the whole field would be so much better off if everybody else programmed the Right Way, too. Item 14: Write an article debunking Right Way whether you actually believe it or not. Free notoriety == easy job offers
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The wink emoji is leaving me with the sensation I am out in the dark on something everyone else knows.
I am not sure what the wink is, I think SOLID is mostly solid but my advice is be wary of anyone who is a zealot follower of Uncle Bob :)
Dependency Inversion I think is a poor idea though. It is fine if you must have many different versions. But I often thing one solid concrete implementation is better. where this really goes wrong is when people are so into Dependency Inversion that there is an IClass for every Class, doubling the amount of files, and IMO I think going by the original idea of Object Orientation from Alan Kay is the real winner: Its all about message passing.
I've been working with one junior and one not so junior programmer on a hobby project recently, and they are both "Right Way Guys". For a roughly 300 LOC project with a discord bot and some rust code that only we will be running for now, they insisted on complete documentation, separate VMs for QA and "prod", systemd deployments, a templating system for a few strings, an ORM layer for four (4) SQL queries.. this is a…
In the movie Primer, a group of four friends start a small computer business on the side. Two of them later invent a sci-fi box and then dramatic shenanigans ensue. Something I missed at first [1] was the significance of an event that happens early in the movie. They need to buy a $50 router because their existing one is broken. They have an impromptu meeting where one of the characters gives suggestions on how they…
And yet my toolbox is still full of things I do because someone I respect did them, or someone I disrespect didn’t, and the outcomes were dramatic. I know the expected outcomes, I have half an idea how they actually work, I just know it’s a magic spell that gets me into or out of problems. We don’t know why asking dad for ice cream works more often than mom, but empirically it does.
There are areas dictated by human factors like errors, or overconfidence. There are areas I will sweat blood to do a mindful task to avoid a mindless one, and vice versa. And there are things I do because it improves outcomes with neurodivergent people, and sometimes neurotypical ones.
There’s a concept in chronic illness circles called spoons. It is a metaphor that acknowledges that it’s not time that’s the constrained resource, it’s energy. A wake up call that software desperately needs. When you have used all your physical or emotional energy you are “out of spoons” for the day. You can’t do anything but veg.
This is slowly being replaced in psychology circles with metaphors that are more like deck building card games, because they speak also to many other groups of non-extroverts. If you aren’t prepared for a task like calling tech support or dealing with a toxic relative, being forced to do it now burns all the other tasks you might have done cheaply today. These people want to know they have a dentist appointment or a date in two days because they need to psych themselves up. Spend energy today and tomorrow making sure they have that card available. And if there’s a cancellation, they are out all that energy and have to spend it again.
There’s a lot of this in our work too. The old joke aphorism about, “why spend a day doing something you can spend a week automating?” falls under this umbrella.
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Absolutely! I'm grateful that I don't have to worry about code formatting any more. But I remember in one of my earliest job the company used style checkers as a pre-commit hook that rejected your commit if they found trailing whitespace. That was before code formatting was part of your IDE. (Especially for us front end devs who used Notepad++ rather than an IDE at the time). And notepad++ had no easy way of showing…
What's stopping you from configuring your editor to automatically strip trailing whitespace on save?
I've been working with one junior and one not so junior programmer on a hobby project recently, and they are both "Right Way Guys". For a roughly 300 LOC project with a discord bot and some rust code that only we will be running for now, they insisted on complete documentation, separate VMs for QA and "prod", systemd deployments, a templating system for a few strings, an ORM layer for four (4) SQL queries.. this is a…
In the movie Primer, a group of four friends start a small computer business on the side. Two of them later invent a sci-fi box and then dramatic shenanigans ensue. Something I missed at first [1] was the significance of an event that happens early in the movie. They need to buy a $50 router because their existing one is broken. They have an impromptu meeting where one of the characters gives suggestions on how they…
Cultural DNA (traditions, rules, and the 'right way') encode a lot of useful experience - but environment and circumstances change. And sometimes it just picks up weird things along the way.
I've been working with one junior and one not so junior programmer on a hobby project recently, and they are both "Right Way Guys". For a roughly 300 LOC project with a discord bot and some rust code that only we will be running for now, they insisted on complete documentation, separate VMs for QA and "prod", systemd deployments, a templating system for a few strings, an ORM layer for four (4) SQL queries.. this is a…
> But also don't worry too hard about getting "tricked" or learning "the wrong thing". Did I learn TDD when it was hip? Yes. Do I use TDD? No. But did TDD teach me how to write better code? Yes. Same with languages I've learnt but not ended up using professionally. Everything teaches you something. You can't find a good middle ground without stepping a bit too far in both directions.
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Assuming tue devs don't live in a vaccum, it is other people eho define the problems to be solved. Doing so consiously, and not unconsiously by chance, is what engineering does. Producing something to produce something, while ignoring the problems you where handed to solve (doesn't matter if it is clients, customers, regulators or management), is pointless. The tricky bit is figuring what the real problem to be solve…
> Producing something to produce something A central argument of me is that this situation "produce something to produce something" rarely happens - this is in my opinion rather evil propaganda from people who hate programmers and their way of thinking. Such code nearly always solves a problem - often one that the managers don't understand. Just to be clear: it does happen that the code solves a problem in a bad way…
Some companies still use metrics like LoC to assess employee productivity. In such cases it might become a necessity to write code that's just there in order to look good on the next quarterly evaluation sheet.
My two cents as a professional engineer coming from biochem: While computer science / programming is very young and light on the science side, it has solid foundations in mathematics, and the mathematics that are true today will always be true. So I argue (without providing any proof) that it is almost certainly a good idea to “follow the maths” in your learning journey. I think this is as true for numerical algorith…