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Maintenance is problematic if things aren't built with maintenance in mind, this is true for IT projects, but it is true for other things as well. If you barely
by atoav 3y ago
Maintenance is problematic if things aren't built with maintenance in mind, this is true for IT projects, but it is true for other things as well. If you barely manage to make your thing work with the provided resources, how much thought are you really going to spend on the maintenance?
Especially in the IT sector many people never have to maintain the things they built themselves. There is always a shiny new project and off to greener pastures.
Part of this has to do with learning on the job. You build a thing and once it is done one very easily could have a good idea how to build the same thing, but better. Part of it is scatter brain. The IT guy is interested in toying around with a project and being the hero that solves it. But once that is done the thrill is gone, shall others deal with that.
I try really hard to build things for maintenance, because I tend to be the person who maintains it myself and I try to keep my own bus factor low. A lot of that has to do with a wise choice of dependencies (less=better), but also with good documentation. I try to write the code in a way it doesn't require a lot of documentation. This means consistency, avoid being clever, always asking myself how one would expect a thing to work and then build it that way etc.
- fatnoah 3y ago> Maintenance is problematic if things aren't built with maintenance in mind I've spent a long time in startup land, sometimes as the only "back-end" person and nothing teaches you to build for maintenance like having to maintain some self-inflicted cleverness or overarchitecture. Now that I'm a pointy-haired boss, I make sure that my teams are accounting for observability and maintainability in addition to scaling and reliability. That means using tools and topologies that are known, understood, and not overly complex.
- hinkley 3y agoI found personally that while self inflicted problems were definitely great teachers, they only taught me how to take care of me, not anyone else. Mentoring worked hard filling in those blind spots. Watching someone struggle with your code in real time teaches you a lot more than someone just fixing your code or telling you it sucks or is confusing.
- fatnoah 3y ago> Watching someone struggle with your code in real time teaches you a lot more than someone just fixing your code or telling you it sucks or is confusing. Very true. There's nothing more humbling than trying (and failing) to coherently explain something I thought was truly elegant to a new team member, only to realize it wasn't nearly as great as I thought.
- hinkley 3y agoI opened tHis page before I went to make some food. As I was standing in the kitchen I thought, “maybe if some people didn’t write code like they were the evil foster parents in movies this would be less of a problem.” Some people are clearly writing abandonware while new investments are still coming in.
- almatabata 3y ago> Especially in the IT sector many people never have to maintain the things they built themselves. There is always a shiny new project and off to greener pastures. Companies also want to save cost on maintenance. Once the project has shipped they will put the project into maintenance mode. They will move the expensive engineers to the new project. The maintenance then gets outsourced to lower cost locations.