CODEBASE COMPLEXITY: LESSONS LEARNED Dumb, readable code is infinitely better than clever.
Don’t listen to vendors blaming the hardware and recommending expensive server upgrades.
Be aware of the danger of shortcuts and the importance of understanding how code works under the hood.
Opening and closing a database connection is a slow and expensive operation.
Consider the potential risks and implications when installing new npm modules or importing someone else’s code.
Beware of teammates who refactor code based on personal taste without proper documentation or completeness.
Ensure code changes are well-documented.
Be cautious of colleagues who make undocumented changes that create subtle traps for others.
Improve the code review processes to address flaws.
Acknowledge that even big companies like Facebook can make mistakes, as seen in their DNS record issue on October 4, 2021.
Don’t ever be the guy who accidentally breaks something on prod.
Broken code is fixable. People, now, that’s another story.
A very recent university graduate joined our company many years ago. He was quite the C++ wizard, whereas we were slowly migrating from VAX Pascal to C++. No one could understand the code he wrote as he was using all kinds of jiggery pokery without comments. We had to ask him to simplify and comment his code! 😁
That doesn’t say much about us at the time!!
Sounds familiar