4 ms·
An important lesson I learned is that meaning and complexity are rarely linked. The most profitable code I wrote for a company took under a week and truthfully
by notjustanymike 4y ago
An important lesson I learned is that meaning and complexity are rarely linked. The most profitable code I wrote for a company took under a week and truthfully any mid-tier web developer could have done it. The code with the largest reach (millions upon millions of people) was an afternoon script. I’ve lately come up with a term for meaningful code: Friday Features. Little things you do on a Friday afternoon that have an outsized impact. Meanwhile a project I worked on for months didn’t move the needle at all.
How did I learn? Started coding in college, about as mundane a start as you’ll hear, but it does kinda prove my point that meaning and work can be very detached from eachother.
- Aromasin 4y agoI can vouch for this. Major project that took months of my time and effort? Seemingly little impact; sometimes I question where it was just management trying to keep me busy. Minor feature added to a tool as a side project? Seems like every damn person in the company, and all of our customers, use it on a daily basis. Funny how these things work out.
- michalc 4y agoI have a very minor example of something similar myself: A quick 1-liner Stack Overflow answer that addresses a common typo is my highest rated answer. Those that I spent hours (or maybe even days!) answering: almost nothing.
- notjustanymike 4y agoSad to say I'm in a similar boat. My highest rated answer explains how to do a callback. I just happened to be first, and correct. 11 years later it still makes me points.
- notjustanymike 4y agoBy the way, "Export to CSV" is the most meaningful feature you can add to any project, regardless of purpose.
- astrange 4y agoI've found JSON is extremely useful in command line tools, but with CSV people try to handwrite parsers for it that can't handle commas in fields.
- mt_ 4y agoThis is true, I even remember writing a few CSV files in Ansible, of all things, a few years ago.
- P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago1. Most people are using tools 2. CSV parsers are easy to write I know I know, someone once said it was hard, everyone else wanted to be smart and started reporting it. What CSV is, is ambiguous. But if you're ingesting CSV generated by the export function of a tool, that's not ambiguous.
- bee_rider 4y agoIt seems like, at least, converting a flat JSON record to CSV (or vise-versa) should be a one-liner in lots of cases. Usually I want CSV, it is because I'm playing around with data on the command line and doing grep/cut/and so on. If I has something that output json... that miller tool is supposed to be good for this sort of stuff I think. https://miller.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://miller.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
- astrange 4y agoUsually I use jq (https://stedolan.github.io/jq/ https://stedolan.github.io/jq/) though I think it has a newer fork now.