My last job was pretty good about code reviews, when people actually spent time on them. My front end code got much better when the front-end expert actually reviewed it.
My current job, code reviews are a rubber stamp farce and I’ve seen total garbage sail though. The code base is a tire fire. These things are related.
I suggested at my current job that we adopt a policy of fixing things as we go. Boss wasn’t interested. He said his boss said “he doesn’t want people gold plating things”.
Okay. I guess we’ll keep this tower of bash scripts that breaks once a month.
Well, yes, though my direct manager isn’t the worst. He’s trying to protect me from other teams that might get pissy.
One of my friends is a product manager type and his analysis was basically “if stakeholders don’t care it’s not a problem, even if by any reasonable metric it is a problem”. So. Here we are.
I thought about it but people are so sensitive here. If they broke something and couldn’t merge they’d probably raise a big stink, and then there’s good odds the checks would be removed “because they’re adding friction” or some nonsense. My boss has already warned me about staying in my lane.
These people have never done any automated testing of any sort. No linter. No unit tests. And they don’t seem to want to.
Sounds about right.
I’m using GitHub actions at work because this place is extremely dysfunctional, and I can just add GitHub actions without it being a whole “research spike planning meeting impact analysis” six week journey.
I took it from “there are absolutely no checks and Bob broke the environment because he pushed up a change that’s just invalid syntax” to… well, I couldn’t make it block the build on failures but at least now when Bob breaks it again I can point to the big red X and ask why he merged with an error.
I was on some website the other day and I opened the browser console for unrelated reasons. They had a giant message there that was like “STOP. If someone asked you to paste something here, you are probably going to be hacked. Do not do anything here unless you know what you’re doing.”
Which, admittedly, is probably good advice.
Javascript is a horrible language, but it is ubiquitous. You’ll want to spend a little time on html and css if you expect them to do more than print output.
You could focus on TypeScript, which will help them avoid some of the worst things, but then you spend more time on tooling and it won’t just run in the browser console.
Python is a reasonably popular language with a good standard library. It has fewer bizarre quirks like adding two lists of ints together to get a string.
I wouldn’t teach C to a general audience.
As discussed at length in last week’s planning meeting, we agreed to continue using isort at this time. Here is the decision document to review: {confluence link}. If you would like to relitigate the issue, which I would not recommend, please add it to the tech planning meeting agenda.
(More seriously, I started using ruff and have no complaints about it.)
All code going to the main branch must have a corresponding pull request reviewed and approved by someone with knowledge of the codebase. You really shouldn’t have the front end guy approving backend code.
Ai doesn’t count as a code review.
At my previous job, the policy also said you were supposed to actually check out the code and run it locally. Found a lot of bugs and issues that way.
At my current job, it’s often a rubber stamp. I’ve seen things like “that’s too many parenthesis. This won’t run” sail through. This is bad.
There should also be automated tests and checks.
A long time ago a director told me “software engineers are the most sensitive people on the planet” and I think he was right. Some people just can’t take feedback. They take something like “please sort your imports. We agreed to use isort last week” as a personal attack.
Well I’m not on Windows anymore so I can’t test it out. Does it still have the option to only show text raw and uninterpeted? I absolutely would not want it to, like, show bold instead of **bold**
I wouldn’t want it to do anything other than show the literal text, and anything in that direction is a loss via added friction.
Notepad was supposed to be the simplest lightest weight text editor. It didn’t need to change.
One of the other guys is on Windows and we had to change a config in git to handle it. Not sure what he did on his end. I have vscode on a Mac. Some people at this place have been working since like the 90s and probably are using notepad.
Windows isn’t fit for software development unless you’re doing Windows specific stuff. Maybe you can get by with WSL or cygwyn or similar, but that’s just a bandaid to make the machine less windows. You’ll probably still have problems with like case folding and line endings.
GitHub and similar tools show PR diffs in the browser.
I dislike postman. I see job postings that are like “MUST KNOW POSTMAN”. Fuck, people should know how to make API requests but postman isn’t the only tool for that.
Furthermore, if I’m doing automated tests to run on PR I’m not going to use a GUI. Pytest or jest or whatever testing library your language has.
I did use Bruno for a while for convenience during local development, though.
I think a lot about how one time we spent s few hours estimating how long a project would take. Management came back and said no, that’s too long, we’d need to finish in a month.
Well if that’s how long it has to take why not lead with that?
Bunch of idiot empty husks doing cargo-cult “agile”
I like the idea. I don’t want to use facebook or similar, but that’s where stuff like “BuyNothing” is most active.
Unfortunately, I don’t know much about self hosting (beyond what I’ve picked up working in software development) so I don’t see myself running one of these myself. I’d probably use it if it came to my neck of the woods (NYC)
Most developers I’ve looked at would happily just paste the curl|bash thing into the terminal.
I often would skim the script in the browser, but a. This post shows that’s not fool proof and b. a sufficiently sophisticated malicious script would fool a casual read
We used to do retrospectives at one of my old jobs, because everywhere loves cargo-culting agile and scrum stuff.
I quickly realized that a lot of the problems were largely outside the team’s control. It was shit like “The CEO doesn’t believe in designers or UX, so he won’t hire one, so we spend a lot of time doing that work badly ourselves.” Or, “management is making us spend all this time in ‘planning meetings’ so we don’t get anything done”
Stuff that has easy solutions, but we can’t do because some idiot or powerful cry-baby is in the way.