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Ask HN: How do you handle new developers being added to your project?
New doesn't mean they're not experienced, just means they're potentially using different technology than yours. In my case I admit the tech I use is outdated (LAMP) so if someone comes in and is like "Oh we should completely redo this in MEAN/MERN" which while it hurts (haha), I admit my code is probably garbage. But I'm also happy to the idea that I'm not going to be the developer working on this and underpaid as well.
It'll just be interesting because I built it from scratch, no frameworks, setup the server and everything, I briefly looked into running Node/Apache side by side or port directing... I don't know that's a hypothetical situation anyway. It's just that with web dev there are different ways to develop something and deploy it. I'm not the guy to fight so I'll just be like "Alright sure, sounds good, have at it, what do I know I've only been building this thing for the last 4 months." But I acknowledge that I'm behind/not great. Have an open mind I guess.
It's not a big project or anything either. But the person I "work for" is looking through UpWork for another developer and I'll have some say (provide specifics of the site/what it's using/running on).
I am going to make the transition into Node, at least to be able to do what I do with MySQL/PHP with JavaScript/Mongo. No particular reason on Node, but to not be stuck in LAMP either. There's also Go... ahhh. There's a reason I don't work full time as a web developer.
- ge96 10y agoHaha, I forget I'm not anonymous on Hacker News, but it has been both ways, 1 really good outcome so far.
- brudgers 10y agoDefining it as your project, makes it difficult to create a team and pretty much impossible if you're not the boss. On the other hand, a person whose first response to the project is "rewrite all the code" is probably not the ideal person to add to a team whose job is to maintain and improve the code unless they are explicitly hired to rewrite all the code right at the beginning. Possibly relevant: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
- ge96 10y agoI am acknowledging that there are probably(definitely) better ways to do what I did. I'm trying to think in advance to put my own ego aside and be open to changes. My work really isn't anything extraordinary. It's just a new thing for me to give access to something I've been working on that someone else might change completely. Still I mean it's about production, doing it right, efficiency, performance, etc... The other developer will be developing a separate area. I don't know I think I am pretty logical in my thinking on how I code/break a process down. Yeah I guess I'll have to see how it goes. Thanks for your input and the link.
- ge96 10y agoHa I like that on that link it says "...Bulldoze the site down ..Start over..." I am kind of guilty of that when I took over this abandoned single page eCommerce thing (without the payment) that was built using bootstrap and at the time I didn't know how to use Bootstrap (still don't really). So I rebuilt what they had with scratch code, the scroll-animations the sectioning of content it wasn't a large site to rebuild but yeah that was probably dumb.
- ge96 10y agoRambling alert I doubt someone would rewrite the progressive loader I developed for this area (really bad internet like 0.3Mbps) that has a 2 second max-delay "interrupter" that shows what it has so you're not thinking the page is broken. I don't know I feel pretty proud of what I made but yeah it would suck from an external person to trace though it though not really it's two blocks that loop back on to themselves before ending. Load and grab the very small 1KB images and then load the higher resolution and replace the low res ones. It could have been written better like the tiling that calculates and "perfectly" divides the screen. Yet it's not easy to decrease the width of each tiles and change the number of tiles per row. There are currently five of them. If you kept scrolling you'd end up displaying 400 images+. Anyway onwards I suppose. Rambled. Edit: I shouldn't say I doubt. Once you see how something works I think it is easier to reverse engineer it than arriving to that conclusion due to various changes. I'm actually looking to the eventual freedom of moving away from this particular project.