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Let’s Get Excited About Maintenance

nytimes.com

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Re: Let’s Get Excited About Maintenance

#41

Post by dasil003 »

artursapek wrote: post #24
alextheparrot wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Manual linting is silly, but having a linter installed really saves a lot of pain. Git diffs should not include unrelated linting changes.

Automated formatting like gofmt is great, and I'm a huge proponent of it. But code is so temporary that it makes no sense to spend man-hours making it look pretty.

One-off script sure, but for core product code I disagree. It's temporary in the grand scheme of things yes, but how many times will it be read before it is gone? Taking a couple extra minutes to clean things up and standardizing style pays dividends in readability, and traceability via git-blame, etc. Same goes for extended commit messages that explain the approach taken.

It's not a question of sinking tons of hours into this stuff, if you're using good tools it just becomes the way you work. Could you gain 5% efficiency by just blasting out the ugliest code you can? Yes maybe, but if it's actively developed code you could easily cost future developers much more.

Re: Let’s Get Excited About Maintenance

#42

Post by acomjean »

Its hard too. my current job with a large existing code base (perl/python/shell scripts and java), and keeping it up to date is a large portion of my time.

The thing is I get very little credit for fixing something that is broken, but creating something new generates accolades and the illusion of productivity...

Re: Let’s Get Excited About Maintenance

#43

Post by pier25 »

marcinzm wrote: post #10
liveoneggs wrote: post #3

(tangentially related to this article) I have recently come to realize that, at least in my world, source code older than five years is basically doomed. Developers simply refuse to work on it. The code that makes it to five years is extraordinary as most of it "dies" before reaching the eighteen month mark. As a result I have recently been shifting my view to support replace-ability vs maintainability whenever possi…

>Most current trends seem to be towards increasing baggage. (docker) I'd disagree, docker for example makes it easier to create infrastructure as code which in turn makes it easier to replace pieces of that infrastructure. Same with micro-services which allow you to eventually replace isolated pieces of your infrastructure. The more modular and isolated pieces of code and infrastructure are the easier they are to rep…

I'm guessing the smallest possible chunk of code is a cloud function.

Easy to rewrite, replace, and deploy.

Re: Let’s Get Excited About Maintenance

#44

Post by wildmusings »

Sometimes you need to stop maintaining things. Towns rise and fall because the economy changes. If there's no economic activity bringing money into a town, it should eventually disappear. You need the political courage to stop wasting money on propping it up. Some bridges, pipes, roads, and trains shouldn't be repaired or replaced. They need to be closed if dangerous, and allowed to disappear into history. If holdouts want to keep living in their dead town, good for them, but don't make the rest of us pay for it.

Re: Let’s Get Excited About Maintenance

#45

Post by nightski »

nathanvanfleet wrote: post #35

I mean, I think the best way to start with this is to use a word other than "maintenance." That's not really the most sexy word if you really want people to get behind it. Furthermore it just suggests that the work is keeping something as good as it was from the beginning. Filling in holes, giving it a coat of paint every now and then. What it really should be called is "refinement." The innovation ends up being incr…

The fact that you need a sexy word is indicative of the problem.

Re: Let’s Get Excited About Maintenance

#46

Post by throwawaycanada »

nathanvanfleet wrote: post #35

I mean, I think the best way to start with this is to use a word other than "maintenance." That's not really the most sexy word if you really want people to get behind it. Furthermore it just suggests that the work is keeping something as good as it was from the beginning. Filling in holes, giving it a coat of paint every now and then. What it really should be called is "refinement." The innovation ends up being incr…

Call it long term support logistics and operations.

Re: Let’s Get Excited About Maintenance

#47

Post by lamp_book »

maxxxxx wrote: post #6
harpiaharpyja wrote: post #4

While maintenance is certainly undervalued, I don't think that means innovation is overrated.

I think there is a lot of fake innovation happening these days. I bet if the programmers of the 70s had had the same amount of computing resources available as we have now they would have built great systems even with the tools available then. Other than the cloud and more computing and network power I don't think software development has really moved forward much.

Here's a nice infographic: https://medium.freecodecamp.org/the-biggest-codebases-in-his.... Unix 1.0 (1971) has a third of the number of lines of code as the average iPhone app. I know LOC is a very poor proxy for complexity, but I have a hard time believing that 70s engineers could replicate the functionality of Google's 2 billion LOC with tools like ed.

Re: Let’s Get Excited About Maintenance

#48

Post by justicezyx »

liveoneggs wrote: post #3

(tangentially related to this article) I have recently come to realize that, at least in my world, source code older than five years is basically doomed. Developers simply refuse to work on it. The code that makes it to five years is extraordinary as most of it "dies" before reaching the eighteen month mark. As a result I have recently been shifting my view to support replace-ability vs maintainability whenever possi…

"replace-ability vs maintainability" They are the same thing...

Re: Let’s Get Excited About Maintenance

#49

Post by emiliobumachar »

artursapek wrote: post #16
liveoneggs wrote: post #3

(tangentially related to this article) I have recently come to realize that, at least in my world, source code older than five years is basically doomed. Developers simply refuse to work on it. The code that makes it to five years is extraordinary as most of it "dies" before reaching the eighteen month mark. As a result I have recently been shifting my view to support replace-ability vs maintainability whenever possi…

This is exactly why I roll my eyes when devs passionately argue in favor of "consistent code style" and spend hours of their lives manually linting their code. What's the point? It will be gone next year.

Relevant smbc: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2461

Re: Let’s Get Excited About Maintenance

#50

Post by deathtrader666 »

nathanvanfleet wrote: post #35

I mean, I think the best way to start with this is to use a word other than "maintenance." That's not really the most sexy word if you really want people to get behind it. Furthermore it just suggests that the work is keeping something as good as it was from the beginning. Filling in holes, giving it a coat of paint every now and then. What it really should be called is "refinement." The innovation ends up being incr…

"Reliability & Recovery Engineering"
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