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Code quality is all about risk management. You're balancing the risks of: 1) Bugs/outages that affect your customers 2) Hard to grok code that slows down onbo
by coddle-hark 6y ago
Code quality is all about risk management. You're balancing the risks of:
1) Bugs/outages that affect your customers
2) Hard to grok code that slows down onboarding of new staff
3) Features taking longer time to develop
How you weigh these risks is different from business to business. For a fintech startup a bug in the code could end up bankrupting the company. For a VC backed social network, being able to quickly onboard new hires is really important. For an app that supports say BLM protestors, time-to-market is everything.
In the great scheme of things, having a crappy codebase that makes money is a good problem to have.
- geofft 6y agoSpecial case of 1: security bugs. If your app's audience is BLM protestors and it leaks their personal information somewhere, it would be better (both for the world in a moral sense and for your business in a pecuniary sense) not to release it at all until it doesn't.
- thekyle 6y agoIdeally an app targeting protesters wouldn't collect personal information to begin with.
- geofft 6y agoThere's a lot of ways it could do so unintentionally - for instance, if it captures photos, it needs to scrub metadata like geolocation and it needs to allow you to black out portions of the photos before uploading them. But yes.