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Software development topics I've changed my mind on

chriskiehl.com

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Re: Software development topics I've changed my mind on

#91

Post by zvorygin »

vladde wrote: post #65

> Good management is invaluable. (I went most of my career before seeing it done well) I don't think I've ever seen good management. Anyone care to explain what that would look like?

Your team gets a clear and simple high-level goal that everyone at the company understands is important and shields you to work on it for a year without interruptions.

You don’t know it, but your manager playing up your teams contributions to the company, arranging happy coordination with other teams, occasionally intervening to resolve intra-team disputes, privately managing egos and careers, and jiu jitsu’ing any attempts to distract your team.

They trust your competence and decisions, but they understand enough to keep you on-track and provide a valuable outside view perspective.

Re: Software development topics I've changed my mind on

#92

Post by qaq »

imjonse wrote: post #56

> ORMs are the devil in all languages and all implementations. Just write the damn SQL It depends on what you're writing. I've seen enough projects writing raw SQL because of aversion to ORMs being bogged down in reinventing a lot of what ORMs offer. Like with other choices it is too often a premature optimization (for perf or DX) and a sign of prioritizing a sense of craftsmanship at the expense of the deliverables…

It's not so much optimization but experience that on any sufficiently large project you gonna run into ORM limitation and end up with mix of ORM and direct queries. So might as well...

Re: Software development topics I've changed my mind on

#93

Post by v3ss0n »

pgsandstrom wrote: post #16

> Most programming should be done long before a single line of code is written I'd rephrase this to something like: Most programming should be done before 5% of the code is written. Because "no plan survives contact with the enemy". I often develop a plan, work for just a tiny bit, and realize some new constraints. It's after that point that you should construct your grand battle plan.

Its wrong in those day , exploratory coding is better for dynamic languges like python using jupyter notebook , and then do proper coding after exploratory step..

Re: Software development topics I've changed my mind on

#94

Post by skydhash »

hliyan wrote: post #68
latexr wrote: post #22

> Most won't care about the craft. Cherish the ones that do, meet the rest where they are > (…) > People who stress over code style, linting rules, or other minutia remain insane weirdos to me. Focus on more important things. What you call “stressing over minutiae” others might call “caring for the craft”. Revered artisans are precisely the ones who care for the details. “Stressing” is your value judgement, not neces…

There's another way to look at this: if you consider the school of thought that says that the code is the design, and compilation is the construction process, then stressing over code style is equivalent to stressing over the formatting and conventions of the blueprint (to use a civil engineering metaphor), instead of stressing over load bearing, material costs and utility of the space. I'm fond of saying that anythi…

The value of software is both what it does now (behavior), and what you can get it to do later (structure). What you described as design and the compiled artiface is the behavior.

The craft is what gives you future choices. So when people cares about readability, writing tests, architecture, they’re just making easy for them to adjust the current behavior later when requirements change. A software is not an house, it doesn’t get build and stays a certain way.

Re: Software development topics I've changed my mind on

#95

Post by anuramat »

hliyan wrote: post #68
latexr wrote: post #22

> Most won't care about the craft. Cherish the ones that do, meet the rest where they are > (…) > People who stress over code style, linting rules, or other minutia remain insane weirdos to me. Focus on more important things. What you call “stressing over minutiae” others might call “caring for the craft”. Revered artisans are precisely the ones who care for the details. “Stressing” is your value judgement, not neces…

There's another way to look at this: if you consider the school of thought that says that the code is the design, and compilation is the construction process, then stressing over code style is equivalent to stressing over the formatting and conventions of the blueprint (to use a civil engineering metaphor), instead of stressing over load bearing, material costs and utility of the space. I'm fond of saying that anythi…

> not the defining characteristic

Did anyone claim otherwise? Besides, I imagine bridges aren't rebuilt every week -- poor blueprints can only cause a finite amount of pain.

Re: Software development topics I've changed my mind on

#96

Post by hemant1041 »

latexr wrote: post #22

> Most won't care about the craft. Cherish the ones that do, meet the rest where they are > (…) > People who stress over code style, linting rules, or other minutia remain insane weirdos to me. Focus on more important things. What you call “stressing over minutiae” others might call “caring for the craft”. Revered artisans are precisely the ones who care for the details. “Stressing” is your value judgement, not neces…

Interesting read!

Re: Software development topics I've changed my mind on

#97

Post by mrkeen »

flir wrote: post #15
Terr_ wrote: post #2

> Java is a great language because it's boring [...] Types are assertions we make about the world This is less of a mind-was-changed case and more just controversial, but... Checked Exceptions were a fundamentally good idea. They just needed some syntactic sugar to help redirect certain developers into less self-destructive ways of procrastinating on proper error handling. In brief for non-Java folks: Checked Excepti…

> Alas, many caught it and wrapped it in a generic RuntimeException. Actually sounded great right up until this point. Deal with it, or explicitly acknowledge that you do not. It's honest. Apparently other developers are why we can't have nice things.

It's already very unlikely that you can 'recover-and-proceed' in the context of any business app exception (Security violation, customer not found, no such payment, etc.).

So what's left in exception handling is logging and/or rethrowing. And the 'nasty hackish way' of doing it (RuntimeException) already passes a complete stack trace up to the caller.

Re: Software development topics I've changed my mind on

#98

Post by FrustratedMonky »

"Objects are extremely good at what they're good at. Blind devotion to functional is dumb. "

Guess this hits home. But Blind anything is bad. I spent a decade blinded by objects being everything (original gang of four book). Then a decade where everything is functions.

Why not pass a list of objects to that function.

Re: Software development topics I've changed my mind on

#99

Post by qaq »

vladde wrote: post #65

> Good management is invaluable. (I went most of my career before seeing it done well) I don't think I've ever seen good management. Anyone care to explain what that would look like?

Key thing good manager shields team from corporate bs as much as possible

Re: Software development topics I've changed my mind on

#100

Post by hu3 »

olavgg wrote: post #87

One thing that I have never been more sure about after 20 years as a software developer, is that Hibernate is awesome! Seriously, it saves me ton of time and tinkering. It has support for native queries, and it is simple to transform your custom query into JPA entities. Using Hibernate has never been easier with the introduction of LLM, tell it what it needs to do, and see beautiful Hibernate examples code. In my Spr…

I'm curious, have you worked with Entity Framework with its legendary LINQ magic?
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