121–130 of 212 posts
Of course, any time I have to add a new Windows Forms dialog to our install/config utility, there's a couple thousand lines of code-behind added to the repo...
Does anyone else question the mythical man month? If I accept the basic assumption of the mythical man month then I also have to accept that NYC is a myth - there is no way that a city that size can possibly function. Lets start out with ten people in NYC and they add ten more people .... My own belief is the MMM is an apologists view of how we currently collaborate to develop software and products.
I did some trivial math. Redis is composed of 100k lines of code, I wrote at least 70k of that in 10 years. I never work more than 5 days per week and I take 1 month of vacations every year, so assuming I work 22 days every month for 11 months: 70000/(22*11*10) = ~29 LOC / day Which is not too far from 10. There are days where I write 300-500 LOC, but I guess that a lot of work went into rewriting stuff and fixing bu…
From the sounds of it that also includes a decent amount of greenfield work. I don't have hard figures to easily consult but I'd guess that I'm at about your average in total, but then on the days when I'm refactoring/debugging existing stuff, honestly it could be like 3 lines a day, or 5, or just planning/sketching something out. It's like the old mechanic trope. It's not hard to replace a bolt, what's hard is knowi…
On my most productive (in my own estimation) brownfield days in recent memory, the codebase would generally shrink by several hundred LOC.
I also find that a huge factor in my code production rate on brownfield projects might not have much to do with me, because it's factors like, "Is the code well-documented, easy to understand, and backed by tests that make the intended behavior clear? Or do I have to start by burning days or weeks on wrangling with Chesterton's Fence?"
And, on the other side of it, when is documenting and cleaning my own code to guard some future maintainer from that situation vital, and when am I burning a day of my own time to save someone else only an hour in expectation? All I know for sure in that situation is that, if my manager is assiduously counting LOC, ticket close rate, anything like that, then game theory demands that I should never bother to spend an extra hour on making it more maintainable if I expect that the cost of that decision will be born by one of my teammates. The 10X rockstar developer at a previous team of mine taught me that lesson in a rather brutal manner.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the sounds of it that also includes a decent amount of greenfield work. I don't have hard figures to easily consult but I'd guess that I'm at about your average in total, but then on the days when I'm refactoring/debugging existing stuff, honestly it could be like 3 lines a day, or 5, or just planning/sketching something out. It's like the old mechanic trope. It's not hard to replace a bolt, what's hard is knowi…
This "LOC as a proxy for productivity" metric seems so much harder to measure in a useful way on brownfield work. On my most productive (in my own estimation) brownfield days in recent memory, the codebase would generally shrink by several hundred LOC. I also find that a huge factor in my code production rate on brownfield projects might not have much to do with me, because it's factors like, "Is the code well-docume…
What annoys me most about these metrics is that some days zero lines are written. Anything up to a month without results to show. Where, then, does all this time go? Sometimes it's reading existing code. Sometimes it's learning about a new algorithm by reading blogs and papers. Sometimes it's developing test programs to iron out a bug or test out some new code. There used to be one chap in the office that got all the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This "LOC as a proxy for productivity" metric seems so much harder to measure in a useful way on brownfield work. On my most productive (in my own estimation) brownfield days in recent memory, the codebase would generally shrink by several hundred LOC. I also find that a huge factor in my code production rate on brownfield projects might not have much to do with me, because it's factors like, "Is the code well-docume…
Interesting so maybe the more accurate way to measure is increase LOC + decrease LOC.
What annoys me most about these metrics is that some days zero lines are written. Anything up to a month without results to show. Where, then, does all this time go? Sometimes it's reading existing code. Sometimes it's learning about a new algorithm by reading blogs and papers. Sometimes it's developing test programs to iron out a bug or test out some new code. There used to be one chap in the office that got all the…
I wish I had a job where writing 10LOCs per day would be enough. I wrote quarter of a million LOCs at Google alone, and I wasn't the most prolific programmer on the team, not even close. I wrote about as much code since I left Google, too. And it's not Java code either, where your IDE has to crap out 100 lines of boilerplate before you even begin to do anything meaningful. This is mostly C++ and in the last few years…
Anyone else feel sad when you remove a bunch of code? All those man-hours it took to write that code, and now I'm deleting it all. I believe it's called sunk cost fallacy. I often wish I had a time machine so that I could go back in time and say, hey, this will all be deleted a year from now, go with the other solution instead.
And then 'getting rid of code' is the most wonderful feeling in the world.
Getting rid of unneeded code is like clipping toe-nails that are way too long. (It must be done!)
It's like cleaning a disgusting floor in the bathroom (it can't wait).
It's like fixing ugly grammar and spelling mistakes.
It's like sanding and painting that old fence the really needed some attention.
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When you refactor code you do not deliver value to customers.. You do though, by reducing the future cost of delivering features. That has tremendous value. Find a company that sees good engineering as a long term investment rather than a short term way of extracting money from customers and you'll enjoy software development a lot more.
Again that isn't customer facing value. Users do not care about the costs of your business, I cannot understand how so many developers don't seem to understand the basic premise of b2c relationships. At best it's the proposition of future benefits and those benefits are all to the company not the customer.