3 ms·

I got a weird reverse one a few years back, to the effect of "your result is great, best I've seen, but the code is awful and I think you're not a good develope

I got a weird reverse one a few years back, to the effect of "your result is great, best I've seen, but the code is awful and I think you're not a good developer". What can you do? I just said something like "thanks, if you have any specific feedback please open an issue". One thing that's nice about getting this via GitHub is, at least the rude comment maybe gets a couple of :thumbsdown:s on it, which can help you brush it off.

hnlmorg 7y ago
I used to really care about my own code quality in OSS but these days I just think it's a miracle if I manage to write any code (for the same reasons described in that video: full time job + family and other social obligations, eg I also do volunteer work most weekends). The way I see it, writing working code is more important than writing "good" code most of the time. That's not to say I don't try and follow some degree of standards. My code usually contains a crap load of tests, definitely tries to follow the language idioms, etc. But I just don't try and get clever where I don't need to. Sometimes this means code isn't well optimised - however I can pick that up in a subsequent bug fix if that particular feature proves useful / popular. Thus I have had one or two people comment before saying "it's not very well coded" and I usually just reply "it's very much living project where some code is working POC and other code has been rewritten and improved (sometimes many times over). However if you have any specific concerns or tips, I'd welcome them. Or better yet, chuck me a PR"
- noonespecial 7y ago
  Funny thing about that: Complainers always seem to think that the code that they could have written but didn't is better than the code that you could write and did. The trifling fact that theirs does not, in fact, exist never seems to register with them.
jp_sc 7y ago
My answer would've been "fuck you", followed by blocking said user in all my repos.
mikekchar 7y ago
The internet is such a vacuum, though. Having someone actually read your code at all is kind of like a massive compliment. That they take the effort to email you about how much they hate it... In a weird way, it's kind of gratifying. Great artists are never recognised in their time ;-) But seriously, I think you can think of it the same way. Would an artist ever make a new work if they didn't think they could make something better than their previous work? So there will always be truth about the deficiencies in a work. But can the reviewer understand the good parts? Sometimes I get great pleasure in pieces of code that I wrote that I think nobody else will appreciate. It's kind of like an inside joke. If someone can't see it, it's not really unexpected -- perhaps more surprising if someone does see it. I try to enjoy the fact that someone read my code. The hate mail is just the proof :-D

hnlmorg 7y ago

I used to really care about my own code quality in OSS but these days I just think it's a miracle if I manage to write any code (for the same reasons described in that video: full time job + family and other social obligations, eg I also do volunteer work most weekends). The way I see it, writing working code is more important than writing "good" code most of the time. That's not to say I don't try and follow some degree of standards. My code usually contains a crap load of tests, definitely tries to follow the language idioms, etc. But I just don't try and get clever where I don't need to. Sometimes this means code isn't well optimised - however I can pick that up in a subsequent bug fix if that particular feature proves useful / popular. Thus I have had one or two people comment before saying "it's not very well coded" and I usually just reply "it's very much living project where some code is working POC and other code has been rewritten and improved (sometimes many times over). However if you have any specific concerns or tips, I'd welcome them. Or better yet, chuck me a PR"

noonespecial 7y ago
Funny thing about that: Complainers always seem to think that the code that they could have written but didn't is better than the code that you could write and did. The trifling fact that theirs does not, in fact, exist never seems to register with them.

jp_sc 7y ago

My answer would've been "fuck you", followed by blocking said user in all my repos.

mikekchar 7y ago

The internet is such a vacuum, though. Having someone actually read your code at all is kind of like a massive compliment. That they take the effort to email you about how much they hate it... In a weird way, it's kind of gratifying. Great artists are never recognised in their time ;-) But seriously, I think you can think of it the same way. Would an artist ever make a new work if they didn't think they could make something better than their previous work? So there will always be truth about the deficiencies in a work. But can the reviewer understand the good parts? Sometimes I get great pleasure in pieces of code that I wrote that I think nobody else will appreciate. It's kind of like an inside joke. If someone can't see it, it's not really unexpected -- perhaps more surprising if someone does see it. I try to enjoy the fact that someone read my code. The hate mail is just the proof :-D