CODEBASE COMPLEXITY: LESSONS LEARNED Dumb, readable code is infinitely better than clever.

Don’t listen to vendors blaming the hardware and recommending expensive server upgrades.

Be aware of the danger of shortcuts and the importance of understanding how code works under the hood.

Opening and closing a database connection is a slow and expensive operation.

Consider the potential risks and implications when installing new npm modules or importing someone else’s code.

Beware of teammates who refactor code based on personal taste without proper documentation or completeness.

Ensure code changes are well-documented.

Be cautious of colleagues who make undocumented changes that create subtle traps for others.

Improve the code review processes to address flaws.

Acknowledge that even big companies like Facebook can make mistakes, as seen in their DNS record issue on October 4, 2021.

Don’t ever be the guy who accidentally breaks something on prod.

Broken code is fixable. People, now, that’s another story.

  • YurkshireLad@lemmy.ca
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    11 months ago

    A very recent university graduate joined our company many years ago. He was quite the C++ wizard, whereas we were slowly migrating from VAX Pascal to C++. No one could understand the code he wrote as he was using all kinds of jiggery pokery without comments. We had to ask him to simplify and comment his code! 😁

    That doesn’t say much about us at the time!!

  • Valmond@lemmy.mindoki.com
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    11 months ago

    Some genius programmer made a totally new shine kernel for the scientific app we had, using template metaprogramming. I had to finalise it. I still nightmare about the errors (GCC 4.8).

    If you think C++ is easy, then this is a simple trick to bump up the challenge IMO.

    Also completely unmaintainable or expandable ofc!

    • LadyLeeLoosh@programming.devOP
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      11 months ago

      “There are only two kinds of programming languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.” This is a famous quote attributed to Bjarne Stroustrup, the creator of C++.

  • Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social
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    11 months ago

    Opening and closing a database connection is a slow and expensive operation.

    That depends a lot on your RDBMS and its configuration. For example, MariaDB can use a pool of connection threads so opening one doesn’t take a lot of time.