> i can appreciate the self loathing of someone who says they work on "merkle trees" instead of blockchain tbh
> like, yeah bro we all get what you're saying but i'm glad you at least realize you should be ashamed of it [1]
Thank god thoughts like these can finally be shared in a better way… cute project but by someone who apparently doesn’t appreciate what other people work on.
The article describes pretty much what I’m facing at my job. We have a monolithic Ruby on Rails application with lines of code in the millions.
Still we general mantra is that comments are not allowed and I can only agree with the author that this makes non standard parts of the code extremely hard to comprehend. I would definitely love to work once on an application that size with a few comments here and there.
In my day to day work I depend a lot on our test suite. If I can’t even find the tests that cover this part of the code I just break the code on my branch and let the CI tell me which tests fail. There are probably better ways to do this with test coverage tools but this method seems fairly straight forward to me.
Documentation is something we started to do recently. I feel as long as the documentation is not directly connected with the code it is hard to keep it in sync. We even have PR templates that mention to update the documentation but the shape of the documentation is just too different from the code to have a straight forward Intuition at which point it needs to be updated. What happens for us is mostly that the feature owner at some point realizes that the documentation pages are not accurate at all anymore and rewrites them.
Sadly our commit messages are 50% of the time useless so that they serve more to know who to talk to than to understand why the change was done. PRs and commit messages are great documentation I wish we would use them more. In my company the idea is more that the change should be so small that no explanation is needed but I feel this idea misses the point that code can’t explain *why* something was done.
This is definitely an area for further improvements. Are there best practices someone could point me to?
I think that the only thing that really works are code reviews. The best engineers on the team should have enough time to review what is being committed and provide suggestions for improvement. Things will start gradually improving, but it usually takes a very long time before you see any progress.
Like someone already mentioned in this thread before, an important part of this transformation is to not forget about the political aspects of such cleanup process. People don't like to hear criticism, so you will probably encounter a lot of pushback in the beginning.
How to you write your commit messages? For us in most projects there's a git hook that forces you to put the jira ticket number in the commit message (and the branch). So if you have to know why a change was made you at least a context of what the task was, which helps.
I wonder where Kotlin would fall in this case. It offers a lot of compile targets and it has some authority over Android (but Dart is getting more popular by the minute/ Java is shrinking only slowly). Will it be the Android language or the next cross platform language?
If Kotlin can set up adequate tooling and performance in native and JavaScript backends, its approach of building libraries for multiple platforms could be a new wrinkle, and fulfill the "write once, run anywhere" better than Java ever did.
As it stands, it's _not_ easy to use the multiple platform setup. You really need to be both an expert in Kotlin, Gradle (and their plugins are _barely_ documented), and the target platform.
But if the build process becomes easy, and, they can build a rich ecosystem that basically can create abstraction layers on top of the target platforms, I see it going far. It's still not there yet, but it's moving quickly.
I'm still in a "wait and see" place with Kotlin. I've enjoyed working with it on the JVM, where the tooling is fantastic. But the JS and native toolchains are still not up to my standards. Just being another JVM language isn't good enough for me.
I‘m also vegan, but I would say cutting back on sugar and highly processed wheat products helped me the most to stay at a healthy weight.