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So it was more or less a large solo project? How do you know your code base was much better than those less clean/spaghetti codebases? Your own code is obviousl

So it was more or less a large solo project? How do you know your code base was much better than those less clean/spaghetti codebases? Your own code is obviously easier to read/understand than that of others. In general it's easier to write code than to read/understand code of others. Developers who are founding members of a codebase are able to navigate it better vs those who come later and therefore able to work much faster. It may give them a false impression that they are genius 10x coder. Then when developer who comes later is not able to be productive, founding developer would blame it on incompetence of newer developer. But it could also be that codebase is of poor quality, but as founding developer you don't see it. It's hard to be objective about your own code. Now let's go to the reverse situation when you are spending hours "tracing state through spaghetti-like code". It could in fact be that it's actually a great code written by a 10x developer, but you are not smart enough to understand how it works. It's natural to blame someone else and not you.

adam_arthur 5y ago
Not a solo project. I was an early dev at a startup and owned that feature area. Later on others took over the code. How to judge whether a codebase is high quality? Consistency of design and abstraction. Does the code use the same abstractions and design throughout? Consistency is one of the most important things in quality. How many unique concepts and abstractions do you have to learn to understand the code? E.g. in frontend context, do you use the same pattern for managing business oriented state? How is that state updated? Are those patterns consistent throughout your codebase? The biggest problem I see with the spaghetti codebases is they lack consistency in design. Separation of concerns. What's the blast radius of any given change? If I change render logic, can it impact business logic, and vice versa? A big problem I see is that codebases do not appropriately separate these type of things out. Meaning the code is fragile and it's easy to introduce bugs inadvertently. Anyway, I can list many points, but I'm on mobile now. High level indicators would be: How quickly can new devs jump into the codebase? Is it easy to diagram and explain to others how the code is structured? How many bugs come out of your codebase? How quickly can you add new features to that codebase? What is the "blast radius", or is it possible to break something seemingly unrelated to a change you're making? How do I know my codebase was good quality? I was extremely self critical when writing it and ended up rewriting it a few times before it was in a state I was satisfied with. Number of bugs are extremely low and feature velocity is high, relative to other areas of the code.

adam_arthur 5y ago

Not a solo project. I was an early dev at a startup and owned that feature area. Later on others took over the code. How to judge whether a codebase is high quality? Consistency of design and abstraction. Does the code use the same abstractions and design throughout? Consistency is one of the most important things in quality. How many unique concepts and abstractions do you have to learn to understand the code? E.g. in frontend context, do you use the same pattern for managing business oriented state? How is that state updated? Are those patterns consistent throughout your codebase? The biggest problem I see with the spaghetti codebases is they lack consistency in design. Separation of concerns. What's the blast radius of any given change? If I change render logic, can it impact business logic, and vice versa? A big problem I see is that codebases do not appropriately separate these type of things out. Meaning the code is fragile and it's easy to introduce bugs inadvertently. Anyway, I can list many points, but I'm on mobile now. High level indicators would be: How quickly can new devs jump into the codebase? Is it easy to diagram and explain to others how the code is structured? How many bugs come out of your codebase? How quickly can you add new features to that codebase? What is the "blast radius", or is it possible to break something seemingly unrelated to a change you're making? How do I know my codebase was good quality? I was extremely self critical when writing it and ended up rewriting it a few times before it was in a state I was satisfied with. Number of bugs are extremely low and feature velocity is high, relative to other areas of the code.