That’s what people with tribal knowledge like to say when they are really saying “I’m the only one who knows how this works, it 's hard to get rid of me.”
I also feel like agile methodology, which is becoming more common, works against documentation with the fail fast fail often philosophy. If your feedback loop with your stakeholder is rapid, then changes to the design plan are often and rapid as well, which requires more documentation change overhead, which makes documentation even less appealing.
In fact SAFe Agile emphasizes working software over comprehensive documentation.
I’ve written a pretty big application for my employer in visual studio. Never once have I run a “dotnet build” command. Only ever used the little play button. Guess I’m no software engineer
The real software engineers are those who can 2 minute Google “how to build with cli” their Hello world console app.
Tbf, I looked it up on Google. I know you can do everything you can with Visual Studio also in the CLI, but never bothered checking out the specific commands. 2 second search on Google returned donet build.
A software engineer isn’t defined by what commands he knows or what functions he can remember off the top of his head or what languages he used to write hello world. Those are easily Googlable things that have little to no value irl. The ability to actually solve a problem or build an architecture, a system, even if only in pseudocode is much much more valuable than knowing any specific command.
Case in point, I routinely Google stuff I already used or self reference previous code I’ve written cause I can’t remember how I did certain things. Nothing wrong with that.
I don’t. Looked it up on Google, not that hard. I also never use git from the terminal, I know I could, but I don’t and if you were to ask me off the top of my head how to use it from the cli, I probably wouldn’t be able. Not because I can’t use git, I just can’t be bothered to remember all the commands when a gui is available and does the exact same thing I needed to do anyway. If and when I’ll need to use the terminal for git, I’ll check the docs for the exact syntax.
Again, knowing the exact syntax it’s not what defines a software engineer, IMO.
Then yes, you are not a software engineer. You used programming to solve one problem one time and you didn’t understand what was happening under the hood. Building one deck does not make you a carpenter. Writing one app does not make you a software engineer.
Programming aside electric self edge labels are the future. Where I work we do paper labels for about 50 pretty small stores and use best part of 30,000 sheets of paper a week.
I imagine with inflation causing an increased frequency of relabeling and relabeling costs causing an increased rate of inflation, it’s only a matter of time before I become too lazy to finish this joke.
I try to always rewrite complicated code. As an example, another dev who left the team had written a program in Elixir that nobody knew or understood. I rewrote it in python (with his help, since I still had contact with him over chat). After that, everyone in the team could understand the code and we could make changes very easily to it and document it.
Another program he wrote in python was kind of complicated and we would have bugs in it that we didn’t know how to fix. So I rewrote it with a completely different architecture with focus on simplicity. And again, now everyone could just read the code and understand it.
I think many devs are writing code that is not simple to understand for others. Then rewriting it can be worth it to avoid the pain of trying to fix bugs in complicated code.
That’s only the first stage. Once you get tired enough you start writing code that not even you can understand the next morning, but which you’re loathe to change because “it just works”.
Yeah I’ve had that experience too. But sometimes I write a lot of hackish code to get it to work, and then after spend time rewriting it so it’s easy to understand. But it depends on mood. Sometimes I don’t change it because it’s complicated and it would be too much thinking required to make it better. :)
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