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This is a remarkably well-written article. Made me really feel for the company, both in terms of sympathy and wanting to see them succeed. One thing it did lef
by quaunaut 11y ago
This is a remarkably well-written article. Made me really feel for the company, both in terms of sympathy and wanting to see them succeed.
One thing it did left me wondering, was covered in the final paragraph:
"...Engineers can spot his name and edits throughout the code repository. And occasionally, back-end commands will pop up messages, little surprises that Tang built into the system years ago. One reads, “You’re doing a good job today.”
How would your company react to messages like that? Do any of you take a strategy for injecting joy into your code?
- kornish 11y agoAt my company, each of our API responses sends a randomly selected compliment in an HTTP header. When we're onboarding new engineers, everybody's first commit to the codebase is adding a compliment to the list. Nobody's noticed yet because the API is currently consumed only by us, but maybe they will someday. :)
- quaunaut 11y agoI like that approach. Might I ask what the header is? HTTP-COMPLIMENT or somesuch? It could be a fun 'standard'.
- kornish 11y agoWe prefix all our custom headers with `X-Ark-` (for auth tokens, request IDs for logging and such), so in this case it's `X-Ark-Compliment`. Also, another thing we do to propagate joy in engineering culture is make heavy use of Phabricator macros in the code review process. It adds a lot of humor to the situation to have somebody draw attention to a bug in your code by pointing it out with an epic skateboard accident: http://giphy.com/gifs/fail-SMwheKIMDwA00 http://giphy.com/gifs/fail-SMwheKIMDwA00