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Good code is like a love letter to the next developer who will maintain it

addyosmani.com

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Re: Good code is like a love letter to the next developer who will maintain it

#31

Post by BugsJustFindMe »

Arisaka1 wrote: post #16
ThalesX wrote: post #12

Sorry next developer, I'm on a tight deadline, used to love this craft, now I just do what the product people tell me to get a nice paycheck.

Yep. Yesterday I ran into a job opening asking for "Java developer who delivers 3x faster than the other developers" in one of the bullet points. It's such a weird point to emphasize that you want speed with no concern to trade-offs, and the maintainability and scalability of the codebase will be the first victims sooner or later.

My personal experience is that the majority of developers I ever encounter at work (as opposed to within my social network) are usually slow because they're bad engineers who don't understand problems quickly, don't have the knowledge or experience to see solutions quickly, and in general don't think deeply quickly. It's not hard to 3x performance without sacrifices when the baseline is mediocre at best.

"Fast must be cutting corners and not just actually better at programming" is a weird fallacy to hang your hat on.

Re: Good code is like a love letter to the next developer who will maintain it

#32

Post by hkon »

Good code is not like art, such as good books or paintings. No matter the quality of your code, if the product or service is not a good market fit. It will be retired. No one will stumble upon it or pick it up after it's gone. Knowing this, the only reason for putting effort into it is to make it easier for myself.

Re: Good code is like a love letter to the next developer who will maintain it

#33

Post by LordDragonfang »

dasil003 wrote: post #10
Attummm wrote: post #3

And remember, the next maintainer could very well be you.

Yeah, it's humbling enough when you are reviewing some old code and thinking "what idiot wrote this" only to git blame and realize it was you. What's even more jarring when you find some code, surprised the capability/feature even exists, then git blame and realize again it was you (this time hopefully with a pat on your own back because of how well it's written). Yes this has happened to me.

Nothing beats the feeling of having a coworker suggest what might be a substantial change to a codebase you haven't touched in months, only for you to look at the code and realize that the way you wrote it makes it a one- or two-line change.

Re: Good code is like a love letter to the next developer who will maintain it

#34

Post by peteradio »

beebmam wrote: post #15

In my opinion, good code is like a Brita filter. It does its job, will one day need to be replaced, and it should be easy to replace. More importantly: metaphors are not a healthy way to understand an idea. Ideas are more nuanced than a metaphor could possibly account for. Abstaining from metaphors might not make for a catchy headline though.

Is this supposed to be ironic? Your first sentence was a metaphor.

Re: Good code is like a love letter to the next developer who will maintain it

#35

Post by 3-cheese-sundae »

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #31
Arisaka1 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Yesterday I ran into a job opening asking for "Java developer who delivers 3x faster than the other developers" in one of the bullet points. It's such a weird point to emphasize that you want speed with no concern to trade-offs, and the maintainability and scalability of the codebase will be the first victims sooner or later.

My personal experience is that the majority of developers I ever encounter at work (as opposed to within my social network) are usually slow because they're bad engineers who don't understand problems quickly, don't have the knowledge or experience to see solutions quickly, and in general don't think deeply quickly. It's not hard to 3x performance without sacrifices when the baseline is mediocre at best. "Fast must b…

There is always a cost to everything.

Re: Good code is like a love letter to the next developer who will maintain it

#36

Post by xupybd »

> The beauty of our creations, however, is not judged solely by the elegance of our algorithms or the efficiency of our code, but by the joy and ease with which others can build upon our work.

Often this is not true. Our creations are judged by the user. They don't care how good it is under the hood. They care that it works correctly, that it's easy to use and that it's as fast as they need it to be.

Your boss should care that it's well written because that should mean it's cheaper to maintain. But, they don't look that far into the future when evaluating your performance. So, often they only care about how fast you did it and how happy the customer is with it.

Our industries incentives don't often align with good code.

Re: Good code is like a love letter to the next developer who will maintain it

#38

Post by haswell »

beebmam wrote: post #15

In my opinion, good code is like a Brita filter. It does its job, will one day need to be replaced, and it should be easy to replace. More importantly: metaphors are not a healthy way to understand an idea. Ideas are more nuanced than a metaphor could possibly account for. Abstaining from metaphors might not make for a catchy headline though.

Why can’t good code be all of the above?

Thinking about code this way takes nothing away from appropriately deep explorations of nuance.

They coexist without issue.

Re: Good code is like a love letter to the next developer who will maintain it

#39

Post by BugsJustFindMe »

3-cheese-sundae wrote: post #35
BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal experience is that the majority of developers I ever encounter at work (as opposed to within my social network) are usually slow because they're bad engineers who don't understand problems quickly, don't have the knowledge or experience to see solutions quickly, and in general don't think deeply quickly. It's not hard to 3x performance without sacrifices when the baseline is mediocre at best. "Fast must b…

There is always a cost to everything.

> There is always a cost to everything.

There's a huge cost to having engineers who are bad at understanding and solving problems. The cost of having people who are good at understanding and solving problems is supposed to be that you pay them more, but that's not how employment incentive structures work in practice because information asymmetry and stigma around talking about salaries.

Re: Good code is like a love letter to the next developer who will maintain it

#40

Post by jedberg »

Attummm wrote: post #3

And remember, the next maintainer could very well be you.

When I do personal projects for myself, I try to comment them really well for this exact reason.

Just today in fact I was trying to update some code I wrote two years ago because one of the underlying tools broke. I was very happy with past me for commenting the workflow of that tool so I could easily work around it.

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