5 ms·

Coding is fun but for me collaborative development has stopped being fun. People can be rude, biased, and it seems there is always someone with 50 questions or

by xfitm3 6y ago

Coding is fun but for me collaborative development has stopped being fun. People can be rude, biased, and it seems there is always someone with 50 questions or a concern who sucks the life right out of it.

steelframe 6y ago
Have you considered that perhaps you're trying to have your fun at the expense of the maintainability of a shared code base?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- znpy 6y ago
  It should be anybody's prerogative. Maybe somebody is exploring an idea and doesn't really care about maintainablity or something else.
  - coliveira 6y ago
    Moreover, everyone has a different perspective of what is a maintainable codebase. Why the other one must always be the right one?
    - bob1029 6y ago
      I would say that there are a fairly specific set of criteria against which you could evaluate how maintainable a codebase is. I feel most of it boils down to how many hours it takes to resolve a change request on average. Developer time is money, good developers are scarce, and if you are doing this for business reasons it's really hard to ignore this aspect as a primary driving factor.
bob1029 6y ago
This is the key. I used to be really crabby with our codebase at work, and programming in general, because it was the only thing I developed on. I have recently adopted a large, sprawling side-project of which I am the sole developer. Having a big space to play in on the side has really helped me keep my interest pure and exciting. Not answering to anyone but myself is easily the best aspect. The codebase is private and no one but me may ever see it. I am also a lot more pragmatic about the codebase at work, as I am not trying to squeeze in fun/innovative ideas at the expense of productivity or the experience of other teammates. Now, most of my "blue sky" ideas wind up being things for my side project. Feels like I have a pressure relief valve that I can rely on now. There have already been a few cases where I implement a crazy idea on my side project and determine the abstraction is also an excellent fit for something at work. Being able to iterate on these ideas in a completely separate domain from work concerns allows for deep (and enjoyable) refinement without taking the rest of the enterprise for a trip every time.
- grogenaut 6y ago
  I'm sure your coworkers thank you for not using the work code base as your personal playground. I always prototype things in side projects or actual work prototypes that I delete or recode from scratch. People get so hung up on how cool the thing they just did is and not at all on was useful. Sometimes you just gotta let it rest for a month to get over that honeymoon phase.
tonyedgecombe 6y ago
This is what I don't like about open source, it seems to encourage these sort of behaviours.
- neididipp 6y ago
  That’s interesting, because every office I’ve been in is like this while working only with and building proprietary software Tool flame wars, constant bike shedding, “that’s too abstract” premature optimization wars (apparently a list comprehension is too abstract for some eng, if-else all the way down!). Every Medium post by a tech somebody becomes a religious soapbox. I quit it all but kept my job. People complain I skip meetings and take Friday mostly off. But my stories are done by Weds, so really I take Thur off and just do work log updates Fri to make it look like I was still working. And the reason they’re done by Weds is cause I do the programming and skip everything else. Job life feels like being in high school anymore. It’s about social appeasement, debating well trodden concepts at length, and exploring little new ground. Import toolkits and go home. Like most creative endeavors, writing code to express my own mind is fun. Writing code to satisfy the pretense of our job worshipping culture is mind numbing. Edit: Oh almost forgot my “favorite”: environments where open source is leveraged heavily. Millions of lines of imported code, at best 5% was written internally. But somehow the business environment is that they’re engineering thought leaders for building a “tech biz” around a traditional business model. Smh
  - iamstupidsimple 6y ago
    > Edit: Oh almost forgot my “favorite”: environments where open source is leveraged heavily. Millions of lines of imported code, at best 5% was written internally. But somehow the business environment is that they’re engineering thought leaders for building a “tech biz” around a traditional business model. Smh This is definitely a serious issue. Imo, unless the project is tiny, your own codebase should be at least the majority of whatever binary is shipped, otherwise you're adding very little value.
    - sgerenser 6y ago
      At the same time, reimplementing, say the complex video codec pipelines of FFMPEG just because of NIH syndrome would be a massive waste of resources. I think making use of existing solutions (open source or otherwise) when it makes sense rather than trying to implement everything from scratch is a hallmark of a good developer.
coliveira 6y ago
This takes out the fun of programming, that's why I prefer to work on small groups. Open source unfortunately is a can of warms, a lot of good things but you need to spend too much emotional energy. Moreover, many of the people that are trying to get something out of you are paid programmers who use open source in commercial software. In my opinion this is a large part of what makes OSS difficult to deal with.
Lammy 6y ago
I wish Github let me disable Pull Requests on my repos for this reason. You can disable Issues, Wikis, and lots of other features, but not Pull Requests. For certain projects I end up checking a `.github/lockdown.yml` into my repo and using https://github.com/dessant/repo-lockdown https://github.com/dessant/repo-lockdown

by xfitm3 6y ago

steelframe 6y ago

Have you considered that perhaps you're trying to have your fun at the expense of the maintainability of a shared code base?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
znpy 6y ago
It should be anybody's prerogative. Maybe somebody is exploring an idea and doesn't really care about maintainablity or something else.
- coliveira 6y ago
  Moreover, everyone has a different perspective of what is a maintainable codebase. Why the other one must always be the right one?
  - bob1029 6y ago
    I would say that there are a fairly specific set of criteria against which you could evaluate how maintainable a codebase is. I feel most of it boils down to how many hours it takes to resolve a change request on average. Developer time is money, good developers are scarce, and if you are doing this for business reasons it's really hard to ignore this aspect as a primary driving factor.

bob1029 6y ago

This is the key. I used to be really crabby with our codebase at work, and programming in general, because it was the only thing I developed on. I have recently adopted a large, sprawling side-project of which I am the sole developer. Having a big space to play in on the side has really helped me keep my interest pure and exciting. Not answering to anyone but myself is easily the best aspect. The codebase is private and no one but me may ever see it. I am also a lot more pragmatic about the codebase at work, as I am not trying to squeeze in fun/innovative ideas at the expense of productivity or the experience of other teammates. Now, most of my "blue sky" ideas wind up being things for my side project. Feels like I have a pressure relief valve that I can rely on now. There have already been a few cases where I implement a crazy idea on my side project and determine the abstraction is also an excellent fit for something at work. Being able to iterate on these ideas in a completely separate domain from work concerns allows for deep (and enjoyable) refinement without taking the rest of the enterprise for a trip every time.

grogenaut 6y ago
I'm sure your coworkers thank you for not using the work code base as your personal playground. I always prototype things in side projects or actual work prototypes that I delete or recode from scratch. People get so hung up on how cool the thing they just did is and not at all on was useful. Sometimes you just gotta let it rest for a month to get over that honeymoon phase.

tonyedgecombe 6y ago

This is what I don't like about open source, it seems to encourage these sort of behaviours.

neididipp 6y ago
That’s interesting, because every office I’ve been in is like this while working only with and building proprietary software Tool flame wars, constant bike shedding, “that’s too abstract” premature optimization wars (apparently a list comprehension is too abstract for some eng, if-else all the way down!). Every Medium post by a tech somebody becomes a religious soapbox. I quit it all but kept my job. People complain I skip meetings and take Friday mostly off. But my stories are done by Weds, so really I take Thur off and just do work log updates Fri to make it look like I was still working. And the reason they’re done by Weds is cause I do the programming and skip everything else. Job life feels like being in high school anymore. It’s about social appeasement, debating well trodden concepts at length, and exploring little new ground. Import toolkits and go home. Like most creative endeavors, writing code to express my own mind is fun. Writing code to satisfy the pretense of our job worshipping culture is mind numbing. Edit: Oh almost forgot my “favorite”: environments where open source is leveraged heavily. Millions of lines of imported code, at best 5% was written internally. But somehow the business environment is that they’re engineering thought leaders for building a “tech biz” around a traditional business model. Smh
- iamstupidsimple 6y ago
  > Edit: Oh almost forgot my “favorite”: environments where open source is leveraged heavily. Millions of lines of imported code, at best 5% was written internally. But somehow the business environment is that they’re engineering thought leaders for building a “tech biz” around a traditional business model. Smh This is definitely a serious issue. Imo, unless the project is tiny, your own codebase should be at least the majority of whatever binary is shipped, otherwise you're adding very little value.
  - sgerenser 6y ago
    At the same time, reimplementing, say the complex video codec pipelines of FFMPEG just because of NIH syndrome would be a massive waste of resources. I think making use of existing solutions (open source or otherwise) when it makes sense rather than trying to implement everything from scratch is a hallmark of a good developer.

coliveira 6y ago

This takes out the fun of programming, that's why I prefer to work on small groups. Open source unfortunately is a can of warms, a lot of good things but you need to spend too much emotional energy. Moreover, many of the people that are trying to get something out of you are paid programmers who use open source in commercial software. In my opinion this is a large part of what makes OSS difficult to deal with.

Lammy 6y ago

I wish Github let me disable Pull Requests on my repos for this reason. You can disable Issues, Wikis, and lots of other features, but not Pull Requests. For certain projects I end up checking a `.github/lockdown.yml` into my repo and using https://github.com/dessant/repo-lockdown https://github.com/dessant/repo-lockdown