Leave it alone

Carighan , 5 months ago

… said no programmer, ever. Especially not after hearing about a cool new feature in their favorite language or library that was just added in the newest unstable version!

ikidd , 5 months ago

Fix it til it breaks.

FatTony , 5 months ago

I don’t care, you’re not to use static!

treechicken , 5 months ago

This week I am to propose two major redesigns to an external API and webpage on my rollercoaster of a project. Let’s see this code monkey land a backflip :,)

AlmightySnoo , 5 months ago

That’s a good way of maximizing technical debt.

h_a_r_u_k_i , 5 months ago

This is actually not a good advice, from my experience. If we don’t monitor, refactor, or improve the code, the software will rot, sooner or later. “Don’t touch” doesn’t mean we don’t ever think about the code, but we make the conscious choice not to modify it.

FiskFisk33 , 5 months ago

if it’s stupid and it works, it’s still stupid, and you’ve been lucky this far.

wabafee , 5 months ago

Or you do the right thing re-write or refactor, apply the latest practice add some tests to it. This way you won’t have a black box anymore. Who knows there might be a hidden bug there that might be a huge security issue and could bite you back in the future.

Secret300 , 5 months ago

Sorry I live by “if it ain’t broke, I’ll fix it”

tsonfeir , 5 months ago

I’m a big fan or refactoring and rewriting my code as often as I can. Not only does it keep my brain “on topic” but it allows me to make major improvements. Nothing will ever be perfect. Just try to leave it in a better state than it was before.

Da_Boom , 5 months ago

At least untill you refactor something, and the act of refactoring, even though it shouldn’t logically cause any problems, causes everything to break.

tsonfeir , 5 months ago

Then you’re not done refactoring ;)

Da_Boom , 5 months ago

Though usually not long after that point you start to ask yourself “Why the fuck did I get myself into this mess”

tsonfeir , 5 months ago

That’s ever day of my life 🥹

trustnoone , 5 months ago

The best debugger is a good night sleep.

jetsetdorito , 5 months ago

flipside: it needs to be fixed but the only person who understands it is OOO

Vlyn , 5 months ago

Yeah, I’ve worked with the leave it alone types. What do you get in return? Components of your system which haven’t been updated in the last 20 years and still run .NET 3.5. They obviously never stopped working, but you have security concerns, worse performance (didn’t matter much in that case) and when you actually need to touch them you’re fucked.

Why? Because updating takes a lot of time (as things break with every major revision) and on top of that if you then decide not to update (yeah, same coworker…) then you have to code around age old standards and run into bugs that you can’t even find on Stack Overflow, because people didn’t have to solve those in the last 20 years.

cupcakezealot , 5 months ago

also applicable to “do not touch willie”

lobut , 5 months ago

Well over a decade ago I remember a coworker would just go through the codebase and add his own coding style.

Instead of if (predicate) {

He would do if ( predicate )

I would always ask why he did it and he said, “well we don’t have any coding standards so I’m going to do it” … I replied, “there’s things like unwritten rules and sticking to whatever’s in the codebase makes it easy”. I told the seniors and they chose not to do anything (everyone just merged into trunk) and they just left him for a while.

Then he turned rewrote built-in logical functions in code like this: if (predicate || predicate) {

Into code like this: if ( or( predicate, predicate ) ) {

This was C# and there was no Prettier back then.

Also, he would private every constructor and then create a static factory method.

Eventually the seniors told him to knock it off. All I said was that I initially tried telling them weeks ahead of time and now we got a mess on our hands.

savvywolf , 5 months ago

The best part is that his “or” function changes the semantics of the code in a subtle and hard to find way. :D

jjjalljs , 5 months ago

We have one of those situations at work. We’re a small team, but one guy is kind of unilateral in his work style. He added a bunch of “interfaces” and “domain” modules in our python Django app. His idea seems to be like instead of doing Project.object.get(id=1) with the standard Django library, you’d do like import project_interface; project_interface.get_project(id=1). The “interface” then does some home grown stuff, and probably delegates to the Django library eventually. All of which to me seems unnecessary, “yo dawg” redundant, and error prone.

Also in some places he’s returning like a dict instead of query set or other Django object, which is going to cause problems later.

All of those specifics aside, because I’m sure he has reasons for all of this, but it’s annoying that he’s been doing it unilaterally. Worse, he had a project proposal to make the entire codebase like this and it was shot down. And every time it comes up in code reviews he’s like “well, I think this is good and we don’t have a standard saying otherwise”.

I started really putting my foot down in places I have clear code ownership, but it still turns into like 30 comment exchanges on the pr.

He also has his own import sorting. Which could be fine except he never shared it or put it in the ci pipeline. So no one agreed to sort and comment imports like this, it’s only in files he touched, and when other people change imports the comments become lies.

We have a standards meeting next week and I am not looking forward to it. We’ve been friendly for years and worked together before, but somehow at this job it’s just not a smooth time.