4 ms·

It's hilarious that you are skeptical of the competence of the SO core devs. You should do a little further reading, there is lots of content available online f

by vp8989 6y ago

It's hilarious that you are skeptical of the competence of the SO core devs. You should do a little further reading, there is lots of content available online from the core devs who actually "do the work" there (ie, not the people who wrote this fluffy blog post).

andrewem 6y ago
FYI, the first listed author of this post has the job title Principal Software Developer, which I assume makes that person is one of the people who write the code. Edit: added missing “is”
- vp8989 6y ago
  Fair enough, thanks for the correction. I guess the tone of the post doesn't convey that they know what they are doing to some people, although it should be obvious that they didn't just sleepwalk into having one of the highest "power to weight" ratio web apps on the Internet.
sgtnoodle 6y ago
I'm basing my opinion on reading the article. The claims that were made are consistent with what I've experienced working with folk with relatively limited software engineering skill. I don't think that's an unfair or mean thing to say. The whole premise of the article is to try and convince me that not following best practices can be a good thing. To me, the article seemingly reads as defensive, as if the author is actually trying to convince themselves or their coworkers that they aren't to blame for an accumulated decade of technical debt. In reality, there's no blame to assign when tackling tech debt. Real projects are messy. Folk defer work for short term gains at the cost to their future self. Growing tech debt is just an eventual engineering problem to tackle like anything else. Best practices are distilled wisdom intended to keep those sorts of problems from growing out of control. Re: the competency of the SO core devs, they very well could and probably are solid within their domain. Not knowing anything about them though, I think it's possible that they're a bit siloed off in their knowledge. If a lot of their core team were there from the beginning of the project and were relatively inexperienced at the time, they may not have ever invested their time into developing test tooling. In some ways it's very impressive that they're able to keep that large of a project going with so little testing infrastructure.

by vp8989 6y ago

andrewem 6y ago

FYI, the first listed author of this post has the job title Principal Software Developer, which I assume makes that person is one of the people who write the code. Edit: added missing “is”

vp8989 6y ago
Fair enough, thanks for the correction. I guess the tone of the post doesn't convey that they know what they are doing to some people, although it should be obvious that they didn't just sleepwalk into having one of the highest "power to weight" ratio web apps on the Internet.

sgtnoodle 6y ago

I'm basing my opinion on reading the article. The claims that were made are consistent with what I've experienced working with folk with relatively limited software engineering skill. I don't think that's an unfair or mean thing to say. The whole premise of the article is to try and convince me that not following best practices can be a good thing. To me, the article seemingly reads as defensive, as if the author is actually trying to convince themselves or their coworkers that they aren't to blame for an accumulated decade of technical debt. In reality, there's no blame to assign when tackling tech debt. Real projects are messy. Folk defer work for short term gains at the cost to their future self. Growing tech debt is just an eventual engineering problem to tackle like anything else. Best practices are distilled wisdom intended to keep those sorts of problems from growing out of control. Re: the competency of the SO core devs, they very well could and probably are solid within their domain. Not knowing anything about them though, I think it's possible that they're a bit siloed off in their knowledge. If a lot of their core team were there from the beginning of the project and were relatively inexperienced at the time, they may not have ever invested their time into developing test tooling. In some ways it's very impressive that they're able to keep that large of a project going with so little testing infrastructure.