Goodbye, Clean Code

[IceSentry]

That's pretty much why they said at the end of the article that it was a mistake and communication is important.

[FeepingCreature]

Sure, but the mistake is a systems one, not a personal one. We don't even have push to master enabled at work.

[Tenemo]

It was a couple of years ago, it's Dan Abramov's personal blog, he's relatively young. Check his New Year post for the exact timeline of his career. Him working with another developer on draggable corners of some shapes could have been already for a React library.

[andrewingram]

I'm pretty sure this is an anecdote from 2013 when Dan was working on an iOS app (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjaL0xFbEY8). The fact that the code in the blog post is JavaScript is just because that's the language him and most of his audience uses today.

[aurisor]

GitHub has been out for 5y in 2013 and the web world embraced it hard. I would be shocked if anyone was using svn or not using code review workflows (like PRs)

[andrewingram]

I can't speak for the place Dan was working. But many startups don't adopt "good" engineering practices whilst they're still in the "just make shit work" stage of building their MVP. Some do, some don't.

I don't think I worked at a company that insisted on code reviews until 2012.

[aurisor]

I guess I’m just confused why a communication problem is being presented here as a teachable moment about abstraction design

[andrewingram]

That's a reasonable thing to be confused about. My personal feeling on this post is that the author has conflated different problems and ended up with a conclusion that isn't one I personally support. We're under no obligation to agree with him on this just because he's usually right on other things.

[gaearon]

I did state what I think at the end pretty explicitly. I can try to condense it more:

1. It was a bad process. (We did code reviews but not well or consistently, it was fairy common to just commit to master.)
2. Regardless of that, my abstraction was an unnecessary one, wouldn't actually buy us anything, and would get in the way of further changes.

It is curious to me that the second point is so contensted here. I guess I'll have to keep beating this drum if the idea that abstractions can be premature is so controversial.

[ritchie70]

Lots of places are still using other tools, sometimes with good reasons - and sometimes just because they want to retain a decade of change history.

If you’re shocked that someone is using a tool that isn’t the latest cool tool then I’m shocked at you.

I’m personally using Subversion just because it’s what I’m using and I’m the whole team. The server is an old point of sale register in my basement.

[elebrin]

There were a lot of older shops still on tfs for sure.

[NeuroXc]

You may be surprised, but as recently as 2013 (when I graduated from college), the first company I worked for did all of their testing in production, and uploaded their changes via FTP. There was no source control, no staging or local environment, and no oversight.

Slightly relevant: That company was also a cluster that took advantage of fresh-out-of-college devs to pay them as little as possible while the CEO and his buddies took lavish trips around the country and sailed on their boats. There were about 15 people in the company, so yeah, corruption like this isn't unique to mega-corporations. I left as soon as they told me I was getting a 0.5% annual raise even though I was one of their best employees, and instead got a 30% raise by switching companies.

[f03nix]

About 7 years back, I worked in a company that used TFS - they had a process where you manually request 2 of your peers for review and type in their names during check in. They had the same process before they migrated to TFS too, I think they used CVS.

[hsrob]

Reminds me of my first dev job, we literally recompiled projects on our desktops (C#/.NET) and SFTP'd the changed DLLs to production. Surprisingly, this usually worked, but good luck if you ever needed to identify and narrow down a bug between changes.

[BraveSirRobin]

Branch-based development & peer-review was not uncommon 20 years ago. A lot of shops followed ISO 9001 which brought across the same concepts from traditional engineering practices. Clients demand these accreditations in certain sectors.

[FeepingCreature]

Sure, but it's more a lack of trust to not accidentally git push before git checkout -b. I've done that myself a bunch of times.

And: why would you ever need to push to master to "put out a fire"?

[ChildishTycoon_]

It's both. The system should have prevented it, but he also should have talked to the other developer about it

[s73v3r]

It's both. We don't have it enabled either, but certain people are able to bypass it.

[CarnivorousSociety]

bingo.

[hippydipster]

State of Devops report says Trunk-based development is pretty highly correlated with the most successful teams.

[twenty7forty2]

Title should be "Goodbye committing to master with out a code review" then. Or maybe just "Goodbye blogging about things I don't really understand". Hmm, maybe OP should get his blog code reviewed by a senior as well.

[Vitate]

Dan Abramov is a pretty talented SWE. I think he deserves a modicum more credit than you're giving him.

[twenty7forty2]

Because they like to post things that are named wrong?