Douglas Crockford, author of “JavaScript: The Good Parts” has said:

“JavaScript is the only language in the world that people think they write without learning it first.”

I think this is a true statement (well, that and bash).

Programming and Software Engineering are related, but distinct fields. Programming is relatively easy, Software Engineering is a bit harder and requires more discipline in my opinion.

Writing fast unit tests will require some refactoring that could end up being pretty extensive.

For example, you mentioned “cloud storage” - if this is not already behind an interface one ticket could be to define an interface for accessing “cloud storage” and make it so that it can be mocked for most tests and the concrete implementation can be tested directly to confirm the integration works. Try to hone down that interface so that it’s as few methods as possible, only allow the parameters you’re actually using to be exposed and used in the interface. You can add more later if it’s absolutely necessary.

Do this for anything that does I/O and/or is CPU intensive.

So, to do tickets, I’d basically say, one per refactoring.

Going forward, writing “unit tests” should not be separate tickets, it should be factored into the estimates for the original stories, and nothing should go out without appropriate tests. The operational burden will decrease over time.

QA should have their own unit for how they want to test the application. Usually this is a suite per section of the app. If your app has an API, that is probably going to have a nice logical breakdown of the different areas that could each have their own ticket for adding QA-level test suites. The tests that developers write should only be additive and reduce the workload of QA. What you want to be sure of is that change sets are getting reviewed and through the entire pipeline without getting logjammed in any stage. Ideally, individual PRs are getting started and deployed in less than a week.

If you’re interested in more techniques, check out the book “Working effectively with legacy code.” It has a lot of patterns for adding tests to existing codebases.

You are really looking for architecture diagrams. These are extremely rare in most projects, open source or otherwise.

The reason you don’t see a lot of documentation on algorithms used or architecture is that most of the time the code is not actually novel. It’s like asking a plumber to describe the physical properties of the pipe they used on a job. They’d say “schedule 40” or “copper” and a dimension. They would not describe the manufacturing process or chemical composition of the pipe. The materials are pretty standard and only require special descriptions for when and why they deviate from those standards.

If these systems could only reorganize and regurgitate 1000 creative works, we would not be having this conversation. It’s literally because of the scale that this is even relevant. The scope of consumption by these systems, and the relative ease of accessibility to these systems is what makes the infringement/ownership question relevant.

We literally went through this exercise with fair use as it pertains to CD/DVD piracy in the 90’s, and Napster in the early 2000’s. Individuals making copies was still robbing creative artists of royalties before those technologies existed, but the scale, ubiquity, and fidelity of those systems enabled large-scale infringement in a way that individuals copying/reproducing them previously could not.

I’m not saying these are identical examples, but the magnitude is a massive factor in why this issue needs to be regulated/litigated.

I think the “learning” process could be similar, but the issue is the scale.

No human artist could integrate the amount of material at the speed that these systems can. The systems are also by definition nothing but derivative. I think the process is similar, but there is important nuance that supports a different conclusion.

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Just to add, I’d argue dotnet has one of the best sets of guidance on style. It goes beyond just naming and towards how to structure code for easier consumption and consistency. People love to dump on MSFT, but the dotnet platform is superb.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/design-guidelines/

I generally find that writing code that requires a lot of “accounting” is very prone to mistakes that are easier to avoid with recursion. What I mean by this is stuff where you’re tracking multiple counters and sets on each iteration. It’s very easy to produce off by one errors in these types of algos.

Recursion, once you get the hang of it, can make certain kinds of problems “trivial,” and with tail-call recursion being implemented in many languages, the related memory costs have also been somewhat mitigated.

Loops are simpler for beginners to understand, but I don’t think recursion is all that hard to learn with a bit of practice, and can really clean up some otherwise very complicated code.

My general opinion is that we are all beginners for a short part of our journey, but our aim shouldn’t be to make everything simple enough that beginners never need to advance their skills. We spend most of our careers as journeymen, and that’s the level of understanding we should be aiming for/expecting for most code. Recursion in that context is absolutely ok from a “readability/complexity” perspective.

I don’t have “heroes” per say, but Anders Hejlsberg is up there.

Generations of programmers have benefited from his work. His focus on ergonomics in C# made the language a total powerhouse.

Just to be clear, that is not exclusive to “engineering,” as other professionals have similar legal requirements (doctors, lawyers, fiduciaries).

More generally, on a personal level, people are expected to act with integrity, and we have laws that provide them legal protections for whistleblowing.

The actual practice of engineering is about problem-solving within a set of constraints. Of course the solution should not harm the public, and there are plenty of circumstances where software is developed to that standard.

When a PE stamps a plan, they are asserting that they personally have reviewed the plan and process that created it and that it meets a standard for acceptable risk (not no risk!). That establishes the boundary of legal liability. In software, we generally do not have that process that fits in a legal framework, but that doesn’t mean that professional software engineers aren’t making those assessments for life-critical systems.

For other kinds of systems, understand that this is a new field and that it doesn’t have the bloody history that got “real engineering” to where it is today. A lot of the work product of most software engineers just don’t have stringent safety requirements, or we don’t understand the risks of certain product categories yet (and before you try to rebut that, remember that “building codes are written in blood” because people were applying technology before it was well-designed/understood).

Anyway, “engineering” is defined by a lot more than if you or your boss has a stamp (and in point of fact, there are plenty of engineers in the US that work as engineers without being a PE, or with any intention of ever having the stamp. Are they real engineers?)

Rebasing and merge conflicts are the top ways that git can turn into a mess. I know that rebasing could (in some circumstances) make merge conflicts less of an issue, but I just mostly think the value of “commit grooming” is overrated. I don’t want to argue about this, if you like doing it, go ahead.

I’ve used the git cli exclusively for more than a decade, professionally. I guess it varies wildly by team, but CLIs are the only unambiguous way to communicate instructions, both for humans and computers. That being said, I still don’t mess around with rebase for anything, and I do use a gui diff tool for merge conflict resolution. Practically everything you need to do with git can be done with like 10 commands (I’m actually being generous here, including reset, stash, and tag).

Well, a couple things:

My points are related to provable advantages to doing it while writing code. They’re also not argumentative.

Your points are related to a personal preference of aesthetic while reading code. They are not provable advantages. They’re also quite “ranty,” which is rarely a persuasive way to convince someone of your position.

If you actually want to get people to change their habits around this, I think you’ll have better luck with my approach than ranting about why you don’t like how it looks.

Along with this, once you’ve dealt with enough kinds of problems, you end up developing an intuition for how something was probably implemented.

This can help you anticipate what features are probably included in a framework/library, as well as how likely they are to work efficiently/correctly (you know that XYZ is a hard problem vs. ABC which is pretty easy for a journeyman to get right.)

As an example, a friend of mine reported a performance issue to a 3rd-party vendor recently. Based on a little bit of information he had on data scale and changes the 3rd-party made to their query API, he basically could tell them that they probably didn’t have index coverage on the new fields that could be queried from the API. That’s with almost no knowledge of how the internals of their API were implemented, other than that they were using Postgres (and he was right, by the way).

That’s not always going to happen, but there are just a lot of common patterns with known limitations that you can start to anticipate stuff after awhile.

I would recommend email for this. It’s a text-based protocol and the original RFCs 821/822 are pretty straight-forward. There are some additional rabbit holes related to content encoding, but if one can implement a simple MTA, a huge amount of the magic of the internet becomes accessible.

I would not recommend trying to build a “production grade” MTA, as there is a lot of minutia to get right, and it’s easy to screw up.

I agree with the need, but not your rationale, I’m in the “always curly braces” camp for two reasons:

• when a second line gets added in a condition block, the braces might not get added, a bug.
• one less decision to make while coding. Anything that removes trivial decision-making can speed up authoring and reading code.

Not at all! Glad it was something simple!

I believe the setting is user.email so maybe confirm that’s what you have set in both? Git will silently ignore settings that aren’t used/defined.

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