16h ago

Speaking words of wisdom...Let It Be, Let It Be

Programmer Humor @lemmy.ml

treverd @lemmy.world

16h ago

185 4

38 comments

If you don't understand how and why, it's broken.
- I feel like these memes have to (mainly) stem from badly documented or broken libraries. The only times where I don't understand what I'm doing are when I try to figure out what someone else is doing
  
  The most recent library I wrote for my team at work is painstakingly documented, and everyone has been invited to the multiple recorded training sessions.
  They still act like it's black magic and just push all work and questions to me.
  
  Dependencies suck
- It's a load-bearing function.
  We have no idea why it's important, just that it is critical to everything functioning.
  
  One of my favorite Simpsons lines, the load hearing poster
  
  I feel like the "we don't know what this function does" meme is kinda bad. There's no reason beyond maybe time crunch why you shouldn't be able to dissect exactly what it does.
  Despite this, the notion of a load-bearing function is still very relevant. Yeah, sure, you know what it does, including all of the little edge case behaviors it has. But you can't at this time fully ascertain what's calling it, and how all the callers have become dependant on all the little idiosyncracies that will break if you refactor it to something more sensible.
  It has been several times now where a part of my system of legacy code broke in some novel fantastic way, because two wrongs were cancelling out and then I fixed only one of them.
- Sometimes its either ship something broken or lose your job.
  
  Pretty much. These commenters seem to believe engineers are given all the resources needed to deliver everything in time in perfect condition.
  
  Lose a little credibility now, or a ton of credibility later? Sounds like a pretty short-sighted tradeoff, and a good opportunity to find a less shitty employer.
- You must not have worked for a dickhead expecting you ship software on Monday that takes months to write when you were given a week to do it.
  
  No, it’s usually ship on Friday. At 1600.
  
  The trick is to be the bigger dickhead.
- What if all the tests pass?
  
  If the tests don't give any insight into the functionality it is testing, they are probably not the best tests.
  
  If the tests pass, then everything is fine... Unless we expected the tests not to pass...then it's time to burn the codebase down and try again after a long vacation to clear our heads.
  Of course, I'll usually settle for fixing the test suite after a long weekend. But in my heart, I'll know what I should have done...

Let it Be? No, no. Let it Haiku.

38 comments