📝 Reading Notes - Programming Advice To Younger Self

A Bunch of Programming Advice I’d Give To Myself 15 Years Ago by mbuffett

If you continuously make the same mistake, make it harder to make that exact mistake.

These things stick around a weird amount, because there’s never a natural time to address them.

I can relate to this so much.

In the comments of the YouTube video as to why these small items aren’t always addressed:

They don’t feel they own the problem which is essentially a culture issue. Small issues need to matter to bosses and all devs need to be full citizens of the team.

If you can’t easily explain why something is difficult, then it’s incidental complexity, which is probably worth addressing

Inherent complexity to the problem and resulting code complexity should be in line. If something is technically very complex but conceptually isn’t (and it’s not easy to explain), you are probably doing something severely wrong.

Try to solve bugs one layer deeper

I have seen way to engineers in my life that seemingly refuse to do this. Don’t just solve a bug, think about why a bug occurred in the first place. Is it supposed to happen? If not, fix the underlying issue.

Bad code gives you feedback, perfect code doesn’t. Err on the side of writing bad code

It’s indeed a tradeoff and it’s not worth writing the perfect code if it doesn’t solve any meaningful problem or if the startup runs out of money. The problem in more established companies is that you have to fight to fix tech debt. If people know they will jump through hoops to fix things afterwards, they will err on the side of writing perfect code instead (or get very frustrated).

Interestingly enough, the examples provided don’t even apply to my day to day job in my opinion. “adding a couple of asserts over our invariants” was considered something wild when I introduced it. The fact that it is considered the ‘bad code’ in this case, makes me somewhat worried about my current job.

YouTube video by Theo on the same article

6:10 Pay more attention to what unfamiliar devs point out then what familiar devs point out. A fresh pair of eyes is worth a lot.