Signs of an Immature Software Developer

> 5. Happy Path Focused

Preach it!

I am dealing with this now, having taken over a project from someone who thought this way. Yes it works, but is full of bad error handling, cryptic exceptions, race conditions (particularly TOCTOU bugs), non-atomic database updates, and more.

"But it works" they say, which is true. But a simple SQL query shows duplicate or missing data where there shouldn't be and other violations of basic assumptions.

Looking at code and knowing what could possibly go wrong is an extremely useful skill. Unfortunately it usually takes running head first into those issues to actually learn and comprehend those lessons (which I have done more than my fair share of :))

> Focus on the business problem, not the code

Staffing and code maintenance are business problems. The tech matters at various levels of concern.

I take issue with point 4 "Rejecting of Best Practices". The article states "Simply put, best practices are non negotiable.". Problem is, "best practices" is large body of rules-of-thumb which are almost always context dependent and often contradictory. Often they lead to worse code overall when applied outside of the relevant context. So I would reformulate as:

Only reject a "best practice" if you understand why it was there in the first place.

Maybe I'm just being immature, though!

Otherwise some good points in the article. I'd say a good sign of maturity is that you understand you job isn't to write code, your job is solving problems for the business.

How do we know what the ‘best’ practices are?

Presumably everyone thinks their own practices are the best, otherwise they wouldn’t be doing them.

‘Accept best practices’ just sounds like ‘do it my way because it’s the best’.