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What are the biggest headaches as a developer or systems admin?

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Re: What are the biggest headaches as a developer or systems admin?

#13

Post by angelofm »

skiltz wrote: post #5

Not having a decent mentor. Self taught working as a solo developer. Don't know what I don't know. If I had someone to peer review code or bounce idea's off then I could have progressed a lot faster. If I could start again I would join a development team and learn from developers with a lot more experience.

I cannot upvote this enough, I am in the same situation, whatever you do try to always work with people smarter than you that you can learn from, you will get better so much faster.

Re: What are the biggest headaches as a developer or systems admin?

#15

Post by shoo »

dozzie wrote: post #10
shoo wrote: post #6

working on systems that don't have automated tests, and are designed such that adding automated tests is not easy. you don't have to practice TDD, but it is a fantastic idea to add automated tests early on when the architecture of your system is still fresh and changeable. projects that don't consider "testability" as a requirement tend to produce system architectures that are not testable.

Projects that consider "testability" as a requirement tend to produce systems that are perfectly testable, but this is orthogonal to whether the architecture makes sense and can be composed with something else.

maybe so. i guess my comment is a reaction after seeing a few projects where it is an afterthought.

i assume by "orthogonal" you mean independent, i.e. just because a system is testable it does not mean it necessarily has other desirable properties.

Re: What are the biggest headaches as a developer or systems admin?

#16

Post by dozzie »

shoo wrote: post #15
dozzie wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Projects that consider "testability" as a requirement tend to produce systems that are perfectly testable, but this is orthogonal to whether the architecture makes sense and can be composed with something else.

maybe so. i guess my comment is a reaction after seeing a few projects where it is an afterthought. i assume by "orthogonal" you mean independent, i.e. just because a system is testable it does not mean it necessarily has other desirable properties.

Actually sometimes being easy to run tests on harms the code, because the code grows its surface just to plug in more tests, or the author stops at "I can test it, so it's good enough" instead of ensuring the architecture and/or interface is so simple that it can't ever possibly fail.

Re: What are the biggest headaches as a developer or systems admin?

#18

Post by cdennison »

My experience is that most technical issues have solutions (e.g. see Working Effectively with Legacy Code), but there's now way to fix bad (project) management other than a revolution.

I agree with other people that you can mitigate the pain of bad management by doing things like 1) Write high quality code from day one 2) Automating deployment 3) Minimizing technical debt 4) Doing "spike" when asked to do something new so you don't give a bad estimate.

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/122014/what-a...

Re: What are the biggest headaches as a developer or systems admin?

#20

Post by edwcar13 »

cdennison wrote: post #18

My experience is that most technical issues have solutions (e.g. see Working Effectively with Legacy Code), but there's now way to fix bad (project) management other than a revolution. I agree with other people that you can mitigate the pain of bad management by doing things like 1) Write high quality code from day one 2) Automating deployment 3) Minimizing technical debt 4) Doing "spike" when asked to do something n…

Never heard os spike. Most certainly looking that up. That's k you.
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