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It’s not about being used many times, but about the necessity to evolve in the same direction. When that happens, it usually manifests as toil for the team. Con

by znkr 2y ago

It’s not about being used many times, but about the necessity to evolve in the same direction. When that happens, it usually manifests as toil for the team. Consolidating code means to change the structure of the code so that only one piece needs to be modified in the future. That can take many forms, but it usually involves creating a new shareable component. Shareable components are more effort to maintain, so just creating them because they consolidate code is not always a good idea. You really want to have positive ROI here and you only get that if you actually reduce maintenance burden. For raw code duplication that doesn’t have a maintenance issue on it‘s own, the bar is a lot higher than most people think.

PaulHoule 2y ago
Well, this morning I just fixed a case where somebody had used btoa to base64 encode something in Javascript and used methods from Buffer somewhere else because they'd been intimidated away from using btoa. (Ok, it is dirty to use UTF-8 codepoints if it is byte values, you can write btoa("Á") but btoa("中") is a crash.) It would have been OK if they'd used the right methods on Buffer but they didn't. These encoding/decoding methods are a very good example of code that should be centralized, not least so you can write tests for them. (It is a favorable case for testing because the inputs and outputs are well defined and there are no questions of whether execution is done like you might encounter testing a React component) It is so easy to screw this kind of thing up in a gross way or an a subtle way (I'm pretty sure btoa's weirdness doesn't affect my application because codepoints > 255 never show up... I think) There's the meme that you should wait until something used 3 times before you copy it but here is a case where two repetitions were too many and it had a clear impact on customers.
mytailorisrich 2y ago
Raw code duplication is always a maintenance issue when centralising it when you notice the duplication (instead of keeping copy-pasting it) costs nothing.

by znkr 2y ago

PaulHoule 2y ago

Well, this morning I just fixed a case where somebody had used btoa to base64 encode something in Javascript and used methods from Buffer somewhere else because they'd been intimidated away from using btoa. (Ok, it is dirty to use UTF-8 codepoints if it is byte values, you can write btoa("Á") but btoa("中") is a crash.) It would have been OK if they'd used the right methods on Buffer but they didn't. These encoding/decoding methods are a very good example of code that should be centralized, not least so you can write tests for them. (It is a favorable case for testing because the inputs and outputs are well defined and there are no questions of whether execution is done like you might encounter testing a React component) It is so easy to screw this kind of thing up in a gross way or an a subtle way (I'm pretty sure btoa's weirdness doesn't affect my application because codepoints > 255 never show up... I think) There's the meme that you should wait until something used 3 times before you copy it but here is a case where two repetitions were too many and it had a clear impact on customers.

mytailorisrich 2y ago

Raw code duplication is always a maintenance issue when centralising it when you notice the duplication (instead of keeping copy-pasting it) costs nothing.