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You only get 1,000 lines of code a week

onebigfluke.com

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Re: You only get 1,000 lines of code a week

#81
post #27
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. And this: "Your 1,000 lines should be the essential core that enables a team of programmers to write another 10,000 lines effortlessly." If you're writing critical core stuff like that, you better spend a lot more than a week on it. I can't imagine working on anything where the team regularly writes 10,000 lines a week. Prototypes by one person can easily grow at 1kLOC per week for a short time, but that's a spe…

I'm a senior engineer who has written over 150k loc the past month :( . I have had to tackle some difficult problems that allowed the other engineers to keep moving. My workaround so far has been to do most of the critical work during after hours or before everyone comes in the office, since my primary role during regular hours is to keep everyone unblocked. It isn't sustainable though, and I only do it at the moment…

That's a lot of "copy and paste 'programming'".

Re: You only get 1,000 lines of code a week

#82
post #31
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

150 000 lines of code / (10 hours * 5 days * 4 weeks) = a sustained 750 lines of code an hour? That's impressive. Can you share a bit more about how you manage to achieve such productivity for those of us who aspire to be like that?

I have an excellent command of JavaScript and AngularJS, which allows me to focus on the problems themselves and not get fussed up with language subtleties...usually. I also have been working 70+ hour weeks for the past month, often 75 hours. There have been multiple times I had to shut my brain for the night because my focusing ability starts to deteriorate if I code too long. I also try to get a good night of sleep…

I work with Angular and Javascript as well. I don't think you should count the html code, if that is what you did. Count the javascript-code only and see how many lines you write in a week. And if the number still is as high as you've said I must wonder what kind of system you are building? Normally you rewrite everything that is repetetive into services/controllers/functions to keep the line count down. There was a talk recently from Google about some large application they had written in Angular, the problems they ran into and what they learned from that. They provided some line counts and it wasn't millions of lines even for them and they still had a team of something like 10-20 developers.

Re: You only get 1,000 lines of code a week

#83
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of projects do you work on? I'm sure the experience differs a lot between people working on important, complex legacy projects, and people developing consumer mobile apps for photo sharing etc.

For me working on complex legacy projects means even less LoC since you're so afraid of breaking stuff.

Exactly, that was my point. If you're starting a simple consumer product you'll write lots of code quickly. When working on something complex you need to consider how your changes will effect every aspect of the product.

Re: You only get 1,000 lines of code a week

#84
post #3

Actually 1,000 lines of code a week is quite a lot. Of course it depends on language / technology stack, I'm speaking from Rails / JavaScript programmer point of view.

Agreed. As I get more experienced with Django (and a greater understanding of things like class based views) my code gets a lot more concise. I just updated some code from 6 months ago. If I were to replace it, it would probably be half as many lines, and more reliable.

Re: You only get 1,000 lines of code a week

#85
post #56

"... From there it is only a small step to measuring "programmer productivity" in terms of "number of lines of code produced per month". This is a very costly measuring unit because it encourages the writing of insipid code, but today I am less interested in how foolish a unit it is from even a pure business point of view. My point today is that, if we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as "lines…

Precisely. This should be an automatic trigger whenever "lines of code" is mentioned as a metric.

I'm reminded of the "-2000 lines of code" story: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lin...

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