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What's one piece of advice every dev should ignore? 🚩🚩🚩

Omer Rosenbaum on February 23, 2022

We'll go first >

"Good code is self-documenting"

What would you add?

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diethrone profile image
Sagar Barapatre

I according to me this is the advice I often hear that I definitely ignore:

If your change is small enough there's no need to test.

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Ben Halpern

"Smallness" is definitely not the proper litmus test.

And if you don't want that small change to break later, a regression test couldn't possibly hurt, right?

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diethrone profile image
Sagar Barapatre

Yeah, absolutely!!

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Danial Ahmed

Yes same lol! for example if I'm making scripts in python and I change to add a print statement with colour I always run the program to make sure it works as I want it to.

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Sherry Day

"X is dead. You should probably find a hot new thing to learn."

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Ben Halpern

Any super duper opinionated advice on which software to choose for a problem.

A good suggestion is always useful — but when it's approached with an outside amount of conviction, one should take that with a grain of salt. The advice often lacks context.

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CuriousDev

The "good code" can definitely be self-documenting to some extent. There can be exceptions of course.

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James Thomson

Seriously. I find most projects built with TS are pretty much self documenting. There are obviously more factors, but a well typed project will get you 90% of the way.

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Diner Das

Any advice about documentation that does not include ongoing structure and discipline.

Maintaining good docs is inherently pretty difficult, and there is no magical solution. Good documentation is a matter of a number of combinatory factors that can lead to success, there is no silver bullet.

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Ben Halpern

Dogma which is complemented by dogmatic backlashes to the original dogma: A software story.

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Alain D'Ettorre

"Learn X, it's faster and better than Y"

The missing part is that X is something of a hyped POC, with virtually no real project using it, with less DX than Y, while Y is battle-tested and there's no real reason to change it expect for hype and some weird scenarios.

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Paul DuBois • Edited

Advice to ignore:

Don't ever ignore any advice, as you can always learn something from any advice you get, and also show respect to those who offer it, but consider the source.

Wrap your head around that one!

;)

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TechMan09

Wrap your head around that one!, I cannot!

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leob

No - "Good code is self-documenting" is a basic truth, up to a point ... it's a useful guideline, if not taken too far (sometimes you do need to write comments).

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TechMan09

Why don’t you code code it yourself instead of complaining about that library or whatever-the-heck you called it?

Uh, because complaining is fun, and it will take me an extra 100 years to code it myself…

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tamusjroyce

Sorry for the two-parter:

do you know functional programming? Like closures and currying?

Note: all code that is reachable is functional. I mean, pure lambda functions or any set-based/tuple-calculus-based patterns are great. But they aren’t anymore “functional” than anything else.

Closures & currying is deprecated in favor of es6 classes. And they really amount to a complex way to do inheritance on the fly. 🤢🤮

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Christian Kozalla

Advice to ignore: "You should not use Dev.to like you use Twitter" ^^

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Filip Oščádal

1) don't learn PHP
2) don't do drugs :)
3) don't read manuals

 
ben profile image
Ben Halpern

frustrating

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JasonCubic

If it works then don't touch it.

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gjorgivarelov

"X is flexible, easy to install and use, and powerful". Which means it's neither.

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SteveParrish

I would say that Don't do that what everyone else is doing.black magic to separate lovers

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Mark Adel

Stop using if/else if

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Filip Oščádal

and ofcourse > "If it works, don't fix it!"
(sometimes may be true, but the consequences may be also quite hard later)

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Rosamund

What’s wrong with good code is self-documenting?

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tamusjroyce

Inheritance is for prototypes & interfaces. Encapsulation / pass through constructor or function, is great at decoupling code

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Sagar Barapatre

That's scary! 😨

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puddingontheritz profile image
Pudding

Most

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Eugene Paden

build it from scratch