Refactoring is something that should be constantly done in a code base, for every story. As soon as people get scared about changing things the codebase is on the road to being legacy.
Been with a lot of codebases that had no unit tests at all and everyone was afraid to change anything because the QA process could take weeks to months.
The result is you have a codebase that ages like milk.
Doesn’t everybody agree with this? I really never thought of it as a hot take.
Today I removed code from a codebase that was added in 2021 and never ever used. Sadly, some people are as content to litter in their repo as they are in the woods.
Who is in the wrong? Your manager, for not giving you time to refactor? Or you for giving him the option?
Why do you need time to refactor? It is just part of the work you need to do and should be accounted for when doing any other work. IMO a big mistake people make is thinking refactoring is some separate thing they need permission to do. You don’t, if you need to make a change in some area refactor it first to make it easier to accept your change, then add your change then refactor to clean up. This is not three separate tasks, just three steps in one task. You should be given enough time to do the whole task, not just part of it.
Only if the code base is well tested.
Edit: always add tests when you change code that doesn’t have tests.
Dynamic typing is insane. You have to keep track of the type of absolutely everything, in your head. It’s like the assembly of type systems, except it makes your program slower instead of faster.
Nothing like trying to make sense of code you come across and all the function parameters have unhelpful names, are not primitive types, and have no type information whatsoever. Then you get to crawl through the entire thing to make sense of it.
You can do typing through the compiler at build time, or you can do typing with guard statements at run time. You always end up doing typing tho
Programing is a lot less important than people and team dynamics
People can always be replaced, they’re irrelevant.
Sure try to replace the one or two people that hold the whole team together. I’ve seen it a couple times, a good team disintegrates right after one or two key people leave.
Also, if you replace half the team, prepare for some major learning time whenever the next change is being made. Or after the next deployment. 🤷♂️
The code can always be rewritten, it is irrelevant.
And it will change next week anyway. 😁
Until you know a few very different languages, you don’t know what a good language is, so just relax on having opinions about which languages are better. You don’t need those opinions. They just get in your way.
Don’t even worry about what your first language is. The CS snobs used to say BASIC causes brain damage and that us '80s microcomputer kids were permanently ruined … but that was wrong. JavaScript is fine, C# is fine … as long as you don’t stop there.
(One of my first programming languages after BASIC was ZZT-OOP, the scripting language for Tim Sweeney’s first published game, back when Epic Games was called Potomac Computer Systems. It doesn’t have numbers. If you want to count something, you can move objects around on the game board to count it. If ZZT-OOP doesn’t cause brain damage, no language will.)
Please don’t say the new language you’re being asked to learn is “unintuitive”. That’s just a rude word for “not yet familiar to me”. So what if the first language you used required curly braces, and the next one you learn doesn’t? So what if type inference means that you don’t have to write
inton your ints? You’ll get used to it.You learned how to use curly braces, and you’ll learn how to use something else too. You’re smart. You can cope with indentation rules or significant capitalization or funny punctuation. The idea that some features are “unintuitive” rather than merely temporarily unfamiliar is just getting in your way.
Please don’t say the new language you’re being asked to learn is “unintuitive”. That’s just a rude word for “not yet familiar to me”…The idea that some features are “unintuitive” rather than merely temporarily unfamiliar is just getting in your way.
Well i mean… that’s kinda what “unintuitive” means. Intuitive, i.e. natural/obvious/without effort. Having to gain familiarity sorta literally means it’s not that, thus unintuitive.
I dont disagree with your sentiment, but these people are using the correct term. For example, python len(object) instead of obj.len() trips me up to this day because 99% of the time i think [thing] -> [action], and most language constructs encourage that. If I still regularly type an object name, and then have to scroll the cursor back over and type “len(”, i cant possibly be using my intuition. It’s not the language’s “fault” - because it’s not really “wrong” - but it is unintuitive.
If you only know C and you’re looking at Python, the absence of curly braces on code blocks is temporarily unfamiliar to you.
But if you only know Python and you’re looking at C, the fact that indentation doesn’t matter is temporarily unfamiliar to you.
Once you learn the new language, it’s not unfamiliar to you anymore.
“Unintuitive” often suggests that there’s something wrong with the language in a global sense, just because it doesn’t look like the last one you used — as if the choice to use (or not use) curly braces is natural and anything else is willfully perverse on the part of the language designer.
Python is only good for short programs
Python, and dynamically typed languages in general, are known as being great for beginners. However, I feel that while they’re fun for beginners, they should only be used if you really know what you’re doing, as the code can get messy real fast without some guard rails in place (static typing being a big one).
Disagree on this one, even though I can see where you are coming from. I first learnt programming in Java, and it gave me massive problems to understand the structure and typings. Obviously Java isn’t the most beautiful language anyways, but once I picked up python it started to click for me on how to solve problems, because I didn’t have to think about that many things. I could just go for it. Yes, my code was messy in the beginning, but I wasn’t working on any important projects. It was just for fun.
So I think learning how to solve problems is as important as writing clean code. And python really helped me with that.
I’d actually argue Python stops people learning how to solve problems.
I love teaching juniors and have done so for 10 years but I’ve noticed in the last 4-5 years since Python became the popular choice at universities Graduates aren’t learning anything about Static Types, Memory Management, Object Oriented Programming, Data Encapsulation, Composition, Service Oriented Architecture, etc…
I used to expect most graduates to have a mixed grounding in those concepts and would find excuses for them to work on a small UI projects. I would do this as it gets them used to solving a small problem and UI’s give instant feedback. As Python became dominate university teaching language the graduates aren’t spending their time learning Typescript, Angular, HTML, etc… but instead getting overwhelmed by the concept of types.
Those concepts I want them to learn were created to help make solving problems easier and each has their strengths and weaknesses but most graduates are coming through only knowing how to lay out a small amount of procedural logic using Python and really struggling to move beyond that.
My take is that no matter which language you are using, and no matter the field you work in, you will always have something to learn.
After 4 years of professional development, I rated my knowledge of C++ at 7/10. After 8 years, I rated it 4/10. After 15 years, I can confidently say 6.5/10.
Amen. I once had an interview where they asked what my skill is with .net on a scale of 1 - 10. I answered 6.5 even though at the time I had been doing it for 7 years. They looked annoyed and said they were looking for someone who was a 10. I countered with nobody is a 10, not them or even the people working on the framework itself. I didn’t pass the interview and I think this question was why.
As a hiring manager, I can understand why you didn’t get the job. I agree that it’s not a “good” question, sure, but when you’re hiring for a job where the demand is high because a lot is on the line, the last thing you’re going to do is hire someone who says their skills are “6.5/10” after almost a decade of experience. They wanted to hear how confident you were in your ability to solve problems with .NET. They didn’t want to hear “aCtUaLlY, nO oNe Is PeRfEcT.” They likely hired the person who said “gee, I feel like my skills are 10/10 after all these years of experience of problem solving. So far there hasn’t been a problem I couldn’t solve with .NET!” That gives the hiring manager way more confidence than something along the lines of “6.5/10 after almost a decade, but hire me because no one is perfect.” (I am over simplifying what you said, because this is potentially how they remembered you.)
Unfortunately, interviews for developer jobs can be a bit of a crap shoot.
They wanted to hear how confident you were in your ability to solve problems with .NET. They didn’t want to hear “aCtUaLlY, nO oNe Is PeRfEcT.”
Yeah, I mean no shit, with hindsight it’s obvious they were looking for the 10/10 answer. I was kicking myself for days afterwards because that’s the only question I felt I answered “wrong”. Tech interviews are such a shit show though that you can start to overthink things as an interviewee. Also, an important aspect of the question that I didn’t mention was they specified “1 is completely new, and 10 is working at Microsoft on the .net framework itself”. The question caught me off guard. I have literally no idea what working at Microsoft on the framework is like. In that context being a 10/10 felt like being among the most knowledgeable person of c# of all time. Could I work on the framework itself? Idk maybe, I’ve never thought about it, I don’t even know what their day to day is. I should’ve just said 10/10 though, it was a dev II position to work on a web app, it wouldn’t have been that hard.
10 is working at Microsoft on the .net framework itself.
An interesting spin. I like to imagine that you could have answered “10/10,” taken a pause, and declared that you’re leaving the interview early to apply directly to Microsoft to “work on the .net framework itself.” 🤓
dev II position to work on a web app
”we want you to tell us that you’re over qualified for the role”
Your mistake was giving them an answer instead of asking how the scale was setup before giving them a number. Psychologically, by answering first your established that the question was valid as presented and it anchored their expectations as the ones you had to live up to. By questioning it you get to anchor your response to a different point.
Sometimes questions like this can be used to see how effective a person will be in certain lead roles. Recognizing, explaining and disambiguating the trap question is a valuable lead skill in some roles. Not all mind you… And maybe not ones most people would want.
But most likely you dodged a bullet.
I was kicking myself for days afterwards for not doing exactly as you said. I’m not good at these types of interview questions in the moment. Also before that was the tech interview classic of asking a bunch random trivia questions, which I actually nailed. Also this was for dev II position.
I definitely dodged a bullet though. Some months later I got hired at a different company for 30k more.
If you don’t add comments, even rudimentary ones, or you don’t use a naming convention that accurately describes the variables or the functions, you’re a bad programmer. It doesn’t matter if you know what it does now, just wait until you need to know what it does in 6 months and you have to stop what you’re doing an decipher it.
Self documenting code is infinitely more valuable than comments because then code spreads with it’s use, whereas the comments stay behind.
I got roasted at my company when I first joined because my naming conventions are a little extra. That lasted for about 2 months before people started to see the difference in legibility as the code started to change.
One of the things I tell my juniors is, “this isn’t the 80s. There isn’t an 80 character line limit. The computer doesn’t benefit from your short variable names. I should be able to read most lines of code as a single non-compound sentence in English with only minor tweaks and the English sentence should be what is happening in most of those lines of code.”
However, engineers who rely solely on comments to explain their code, are bad at writing readable code.
SPAs are mostly garbage, and the internet has been irreparably damaged by lazy devs chasing trends just to building simple sites with overly complicated fe frameworks.
90% of the internet actually should just be rendered server side with a bit of js for interactivity. JQuery was fine at the time, Javascript is better now and Alpinejs is actually awesome. Nowadays, REST w/HTMX and HATEOAS is the most productive, painless and enjoyable web development can get. Minimal dependencies, tiny file sizes, fast and simple.
Unless your web site needs to work offline (it probably doesn’t), or it has to manage client state for dozen/hundreds of data points (e.g. Google Maps), you don’t need a SPA. If your site only needs to track minimal state, just use a good SSR web framework (Rails, asp.net, Django, whatever).
Most modern software is way too complex for what it actually does.
The best codebase I have ever seen and collaborated on was also boring as fuck.
- Small, immutable modules.
- Every new features was coded by extension (the ‘o’ in S.O.L.I.D)
- All dependencies were resolved by injection.
- All the application life cycle was managed by configurable scopes.
- There was absolutely no boiler plate except for the initial injectors.
- All of the tests were brain-dead and took very minimal effort to write. Tests served both as documentation and specification for modules.
- “Refactoring” was as simple as changing a constructor or a configuration file.
- All the input/output of the modules were configurable streams.
There is more to it, but basically, it was a very strict codebase, and it used a lot of opinionated libraries. Not an easy codebase to understand if you’re a newbie, but it was absolutely brain dead to maintain and extend on.
Coding actually took very little time of our day, most of it consisted of researching the best tech or what to add next. I think the codebase was objectively strictly better than all other similar software I’ve seen and worked on. We joked A LOT when it came time to change something in the app pretending it would take weeks and many 8 pointers, then we’d casually make the change while joking about it.
It might sound mythical and bullshity, and it wasn’t perfect, it should be said that dependency injection often come in the form of highly opinionated frameworks, but it really felt like what software development should be. It really felt like engineering, boring and predictable, every PO dreams.
That being said, I given up trying to convince people that having life-cycle logic are over the place and fetching dependencies left and right always lead to chaos. Unfortunately I cannot really tell you guys what the software was about because I am not allowed to, but there was a lot of moving parts (hence why we decided to go with this approach). I will also reiterate that it was boring as fuck. If anything, my hot take would be that most programmers are subconsciously lying to themselves, and prefer to code whatever it is they like, instead of what the codebase need, and using whatever tool they like, instead of the tools the project and the team need. Programming like and engineer is not “fun”, programming like a cowboy and ignoring the tests is a whole lot of fun.
Go with what works
Error messages should contain the information that caused the error. Your average Microsoft error “error 37253” is worthless to me
Keep functions or methods short. Anything longer than 20 - 50 lines is likely too long
Comment why is happening, not what
PHP is actually a really nice language to work with both for web and command line utils
Don’t over engineer, KISS. Keep It Simple Stupid
SOLID is quite okay but sometimes there are solid reasons to break those rules
MVC is a PITA in practice, avoid it when possible
PHP the language has become pretty nice, but I recently had to work with a PHP CMS deployment, and it was an absolute pain to do. PHP frameworks seem to still exist in a world where you manually upload code to a manually configured server running apache. Dockerizing the CMS (uses Symfony) is/was an absolute pain.
I know that there are loads of solutions out there that can do this for you, though I don’t have much experience with it myself directly. Not a great fan of docker, still, as it’s not a requirement and in many cases that extra piece that fails and then is a PITA to fix.
I’ll look to include it in my own framework, though
JS is horse shit. Instead of trying to improve it or using that high level scripting language as a compilation target (wtf?!), we should deprecate it entirely and put all efforts into web assembly.
Idk anything about web assembly but I 100% agree that JS is absurd and feels like it was created in a weekend by some schmuck who just wanted to be able to edit html on the fly because it was.
That’s basically how it happened.
Tools that use a GUI are just as good (if not better) than their CLI equivalents in most cases. There’s a certain kind of dev that just gets a superiority complex about using CLI stuff.
The big thing you can do from the command line is script it.
PHP aint all that bad
