This would be a great title for an article about Rust lifetimes.
Good coders borrow, great coders steal
11–20 of 58 posts
Re: Good coders borrow, great coders steal
#12I read this article on vice gaming earlier about giving credit to creators for assets used in development that I thought was interesting...
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qj4pzd/how-we-assign-cred...
For me it just comes down to the license, I’d probably credit an artist for their work if I used it in a game but if the license doesn’t say that then there’s no onus to right?
If I like the stuff enough to use it in my project then The creator deserves some recognition, is there a reason not to?
Re: Good coders borrow, great coders steal
#13I often incorporate snippets; some from SO, some from SomeRandomDudesMessyBlog.io
I have a rule, though: I never add code, unless I understand it 100%, and I often make tweaks to adjust it to my immediate needs.
One of my best thefts was a simple FIFO queue, from this book: https://www.objc.io/books/advanced-swift/
This is my adaptation: https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_Generic_Swift_Tool...
I really had to do almost nothing to improve it. I think I just extended its utility a bit.
Of course, these weren't your usual SO "academic sample" dudes.
Re: Good coders borrow, great coders steal
#14This should be a real book!
It is important -- vital even -- to know how to find the right code, how to understand and test it, how to modify it.
And not just from stack overflow, but also from colleagues and even yourself.
If this were real, I would buy it.
Re: Good coders borrow, great coders steal
#15Something I realized working on a large internal codebase at a company: any line of code you write is liable to be copied-and-pasted at some point in the future.
And that's good! Consistency is a very valuable quality of large codebases worked on by many engineers.
If I want to figure out how to write a unit test for a service call, find an existing example of that pattern and copy that. Resist the temptation to invent a new, very slightly better way of doing that.
There's a big corollary to this: if you find yourself doing something for the very first time in that particular codebase, take the time to do it well. Because everyone else will be copying your code for the future lifetime of the project.
Re: Good coders borrow, great coders steal
#16Making a copy of an example someone has publicly posted to help people and modifying that copy to properly integrate it isn’t “stealing”. It was offered freely and the original author isn’t deprived of the benefits of their original work. This article just wants to sound edgy.
It's not trying to be edgy, it's riffing on a famous aphorism that is often attributed to Pablo Picasso. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/03/06/artists-steal/
TLDR; it's probably T.S. Elliot and Stravinsky that deserve the credit.
Re: Good coders borrow, great coders steal
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not trying to be edgy, it's riffing on a famous aphorism that is often attributed to Pablo Picasso. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/03/06/artists-steal/
TLDR; it's probably T.S. Elliot and Stravinsky that deserve the credit.
It was Steve Jobs
/s
Re: Good coders borrow, great coders steal
#18Something I realized working on a large internal codebase at a company: any line of code you write is liable to be copied-and-pasted at some point in the future. And that's good! Consistency is a very valuable quality of large codebases worked on by many engineers. If I want to figure out how to write a unit test for a service call, find an existing example of that pattern and copy that. Resist the temptation to inve…
I introduced a new way of doing unit tests at a client recently, and, sure enough, my unit tests were basically treated as a template. Everybody added their own spin to it, but the basic structure was the same. I was quite glad that I had suspected this beforehand and accounted for it.
Re: Good coders borrow, great coders steal
#19Something I realized working on a large internal codebase at a company: any line of code you write is liable to be copied-and-pasted at some point in the future. And that's good! Consistency is a very valuable quality of large codebases worked on by many engineers. If I want to figure out how to write a unit test for a service call, find an existing example of that pattern and copy that. Resist the temptation to inve…
I work at a FAANG with a monorepo (or nearly so). For anything that’s not blue-sky R&D, stalking around the codebase for working examples and patterns is a big part of the job.
I’ve felt that there is a potentially a role missing here: a kind of free-floating code librarian who is not attached to any particular team and could be called upon to perform basic research of existing patterns. Part of this role could be to maintain the kind of newbie-friendly documentation that tends to fall between the gaps of tool/infra/product teams. Maybe the job title could be “software informatician”.
Re: Good coders borrow, great coders steal
#20Making a copy of an example someone has publicly posted to help people and modifying that copy to properly integrate it isn’t “stealing”. It was offered freely and the original author isn’t deprived of the benefits of their original work. This article just wants to sound edgy.
Content on Stack Overflow isn’t technically offered freely. It’s offered under a specific license with specific conditions.