Comment by gmueckl
4 days ago
Don't be afraid to show your thoughts when asked to. The best developers are those that can express their thoughts clearly at any stage throughout their process. This is one of the skills that shows to me the level of experience a developer has.
I don't want the private API key I temporarily hardcoded in my public history. Nor do I want the drag of worrying about so much as sneezing in the general vicinity of a secret in my editor window, when I already self review before commit.
I don't want the unkind rant about a coworker's design as I attempt to figure out what they were smoking when they made the thing I'm trying to use, needlessly offending them. For starters, once it clicks, it might all make sense, and have turned out to be my mistake. For another, even if a rant is warranted, a pass for "tact", or at least limiting the blame to the blame that is warranted, is proper.
I don't want to drag a coworker through my chain of confusion until I've made an appropriate amount of effort to unconfuse myself first. To do otherwise is likely to bring us both to confusion, possibly in different ways, possibly including confusion about what we're confused about, which is just a mess and dead weight. There's a time and place to explain and teach, and a time and place to expose my own confusion and ask for help, but neither is step 1.
Even if the API is undocumented and confusing, even if you're expected to ask for help as step 1, there's value in a fresh set of eyes getting a feel for exactly how the API is confusing before that, thus informing directions for potential improvement (be that API changes or improved documentation.)
I'm not advocating committing secrets to version control.
But you can learn to phrase your WTFs about your colleague's code politely and constructively. I would even argue that this an absolutely basic skill for professionals. It typically leads to faster and better answers whenever a discussion arises.
Even if confusion seems to spread in a discussion, I would expect the person who realizes this first to call that out and and to reset the conversation.
There is nothing magic or onerous about this.
> But you can learn to phrase your WTFs about your colleague's code politely and constructively.
I see a fundamental difference between thoughts and whatever words I pronounce. You're saying "you should share your thoughts", and I disagree. My thoughts are mine. Whenever I want to share something with the world, I phrase it and share the result of that process.
> But you can learn to phrase your WTFs about your colleague's code politely and constructively. I would even argue that this an absolutely basic skill for professionals. It typically leads to faster and better answers whenever a discussion arises.
Phrasing things politely and constructively is what I'm explicitly advocating for when I'm calling for "tact", yes. But said phrasing is not necessairly the very first thoughts out of my mind. When we push back on sharing our raw thoughts, it's precisely because we want a moment to be able to translate from passionate, driven, and perhaps rude thoughts - to polite, if perhaps a bit professionally dispassionate words. From unconvincing incendiary moral judgements against the cult of the singleton, to concrete examples of maintainence concerns and tradeoffs that can be discussed by everyone. From things that barely make sense in the context of our own minds, to things communicated clearly within the context and bounds of our shared understanding.
> Even if confusion seems to spread in a discussion, I would expect the person who realizes this first to call that out and and to reset the conversation.
Simply calling out confusion is insufficient to resolve confusion. Being able to narrow down what I'm confused about is an important skill and first step towards either unconfusing myself, or seeking help from others, allowing them to aid me in solving said confusion.
Unconfusing others is a step more difficult. Unlike with my own confusion, I find it necessary to build an accurate mental model of their thought process through my own indirect observation and questions, to understand where they've misunderstood, the correct understanding, and then a means of explaining and contrasting those two states through nothing more than clear communication to bring them out of said confusion. I may have to construct full blown examples, showing a concrete way their own initial biases fail them.
These are important skills and steps to take, of course, and you're right that there's nothing magic about it, but this is something I've expended a lot of time on over the decades I've been puttering around in development circles. It's time intensive, requiring one or more people focusing on a single individual's issues, just to reset things to a baseline of being unconfused enough to do good work.
And, of course, it will always be necessary, and I'm glad to help. It's a skill I believe I'm good at, and by unblocking coworkers and friends, I can potentially spend minutes of my time to save hours or even days of theirs, which is well worth it. But it's also worth taking the time to avoid such scenarios coming up again. It saves me time, and it saves them time.
Sometimes that means clearing up ambiguous or confusing documentation.
Sometimes that means keeping others at arm's length - at least until I'm at least no longer confused about what exactly I'm confused about.
One of my professors in undergrad said: the most dangerous mathematicians are the ones that begin the proof with "Consider a case ...". He said that these mathematicians are the ones who don't share anything about how they got the case and they end up projecting this sort of "magician aura". I don't know how accurate that assessment it, but I think it captures something that never sat well with me.
In my life, I've never liked people who deliberately polish up their articulation to the level that it obfuscates how they arrived at that understanding (whether it's academics or engineers). They might not do it for attention and they might not be doing it knowingly. IMO, they are taking away the opportunity of learning from the people they are talking to. For me the conversation is one sided. I'm there to listen, but rarely can I ask questions, give feedback or grow from where they have possibly reached.
Ugh, let's take a step back and make a distinction:
I don't need your fluff. No one cares how you arrived writing another crud line to save an object to database or sent yet another AJAX call.
If you wrote some genuine great compression algorithm that's a different take on compression, I would like to see step by step reasoning and eventual dead ends.
I shared my thoughts in the context of someone saying that one should be able to share your line of thinking when asked to. Whether "when one asked to" applies to keystroke by keystroke blockhained versioning isn't my point of discussion.
I get it, that the overall discussion is about DeltaDB. I'd say interesting concept to toy with. I'd pay more attention to "micro commits" as the idea more than the keylogger.
why this particular object though?
why didn't you add these three other parameters to it?
how does this default value make sense when unset?
mostly things that end up not-in-the-commit that 3 years from now people are gonna wonder about is really handy to know
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I think a good argument ad absurdum for this is to look at how some recipe sites give the entire genealogical history of the author and an anecdote about how their gammy met Theodore Roosevelt and he stole her pen. Three pages later I discover I need to go to the grocery store because the recipe requires sour cream. And the store is closed so I need a different recipe.
Don't fucking do that. Do something way less than halfway to that line.
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OTOH polishing up the presentation can really improve the experience of a first-time reader of the work (e.g. your code reviewers). If the polishing is done with good intent and proficiency you can make something that was very convoluted and difficult to arrive at digestible with far less effort. It also aids your own understanding: "If we can reduce it to the freshman level that means we really understand it" (or similar I didn't look up the exact quote, attributed to Feynman). If you're polishing something up to make it understandable that's totally different than polishing it up to make yourself seem smart, right?
Oh, I *love* those kind of people who take the time to _simplify_ and draw meaningful insights from their first draft. They take the time to ensure that they are not just putting out thoughts for the heck of it. They have gone through a learning journey and they are letting you step on it. They might even make the effort to actually articulate their intuition: "it seemed like a good idea to toy with this, because such and such usually have some connection".
Maybe this is the mathematician's lament rejigged. And I have held it for probably 20 years of my life. I try to do things differently when I write, but I have to say there are enough people who find it sub-standard. It's too imprecise or ambiguous or not clear enough for their taste. They aren't wrong. But I'm not done learning and I start building my thoughts as I go along.
"So I was thinking about #####'s Law this morning, and I realized that #######'s Theorem might apply if we do this and ignore that. Then I went up a blind alley and stopped for coffee and realized I was overcomplicating it, we don't care about negative or imaginary solutions."
They don't need to know I was brushing my teeth and thinking of bacon and an argument I had with my spouse right before I thought that though. Or how rude the customer in front of me was to the new barista who was just trying her best.
The example I had was of Ramanujam. "It was revealed to me in a dream"
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I personally stumble upon many topics where I only care about the what. In that case all the theory is just a distraction I'm just wading through to get to the point. If it's optional, then looking into the how and why is certainly nice, but it should be part of an appendix or a commentary and not interspersed within the proof unless an uncommented version exists.
Nobody needs to know quite how messy the process of making the sausage is though. There are steps that provide information, even about how the bugs got in there. But not every thought needs to be expressed.
Disagree. This how people best learn from each other. It's also nice to audit your own thought process objectively.
It makes one vulnerable though, that's for sure. Psychologically I mean.
Whether you realize it or not, you're insisting all the neurodivergent people at your job unmask themselves, and fuck that noise.
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Maybe the person reviewing your PR is too busy to also provide therapy for your internal thoughts while writing the code?
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health inspector is a literal job that needs to know how messy the process of making the sausage is, so they can enforce health standards so nobody gets sick when eating it.
if you're calling what you're doing engineering, you are following a standard best practice, and should easily be able to run through a checklist and show your work at each step.
not every thought needs to be expressed sure. its irrelevant what you thought about your lunch. Its important how you picked what latency numbers are important, and how you went about predicting volume, including what factors your did and didnt look at.
software developers havent been rigourous engineers over the last several decades, and that isnt a good thing
No arguments here. The weird thing is that this was all much more straightforward when we did trunk-based development. You still ended up stashing four different things and having multiple speculative local branches while you tried your crazy ass ideas out, and Mikado Method was your very best friend.
What ended up happening is you committed the safe bits and the reversible decisions first to buy yourself time to work out the tricky bits before you had to commit (literally and figuratively).
I think trunk-based development is greater than PRs, but the values are close enough that the politics of PRs (specifically, consensus-based development) win out, or at least aren't worth fighting.