

Show Us Your Production Code - AlexanderZ
http://say26.com/show-us-your-production-code

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jiggy2011
Not everyone has the luxury of owning the IP to their production codebase. If
you want to start posting chunks of it online you're going to need a better
excuse to give your boss than "I want to win an internet argument".

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AlexanderZ
It's not to win an argument but rather to share it with other developers (and
get feedback). So your request to the boss will sound like "I'm hesitant if
this piece of code is the best way to do it, can I show it to the world?"

~~~
jiggy2011
Well, saying that might sound like you are suggesting you don't know what you
are doing. Besides it's unlikely that you are going to get meaningful feedback
based on one chunk of code without the context of all the other stuff it
interacts with.

If that level of peer review is really important to you , then you would be
best off releasing the source to your entire app.

~~~
AlexanderZ
Have you been following all the Ruby discussions in the past few days? A
single action from a complex controller in Basecamp would be enough for me to
understand how 37 Signals are handling the not so skinny controller stuff.

It would be much more useful than seeing another 'create user and send email'
stuff, which I see in almost every article about controllers.

~~~
jiggy2011
Not really, but I don't think seeing a bunch of code with calls to hidden
function would be all that useful.

It is simple enough to distill your approach down into some fictional code
that can be easily understood. I do it all the time when I'm posting questions
on Stack Overflow and don't want to stick the real code on there.

It might be nice to see some of their production code, but it doesn't really
offer any value to them other than being able to fire a shot in an internet
war.

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untitledly
Are you not concern about many security issue with showing production code?

~~~
AlexanderZ
Showing one controller action or model method will not compromise your
application security.

I'm not saying people should put their application to github, just asking them
to use real examples in their articles (like I did with
MessagesController#create)

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PommeDeTerre
Perhaps the reason is that the actual production code is an unholy mess that
they'd be ashamed to show?

Many times during my career, I've had to deal with those who profess to know
the "right way" of doing things. They'll throw acronyms like DRY and YAGNI at
you all day. They'll go on and on about patterns and "best practices". Yet
when it comes to writing actual production-grade code, they often produce the
worst of the worst.

This behavior has, in my experience, been extremely prevalent within the Ruby
community, and with the JavaScript community to a lesser extent. So I wouldn't
be at all surprised to see them making all sorts of recommendations, without
ever backing it up with real-world code.

~~~
AlexanderZ
That's been my guess as well. Probably some developers are ashamed. But if you
think about it, sharing real, messy code is much more useful than showing a
polished, contrived example.

