Re:Ask HN: What do you think of reusing code you write betwe...
by Gibbon1 on Saturday November 24, 2018 @06:35PM
(#18524525)
A couple of things.
It's cheaper and lower risk to hire a contractor to provide a solution to a problem when the contractor has domain knowledge, tools and code to provide a solution. Forcing him to create a solution out of whole cloth is just dumb. More expensive and comes with a much higher risk of failure and slipped deadlines. There are a ton of customers that only care that a solution was provided and have no economic interest in the software itself.
Working with a codebase you're familiar with has a few advantages. You are using a worked out API which allows you to customize it without writting yet another broken wheel API from scratch. You know where bugs are, and you often avoid exposing existing but unknown bugs due to habit[1].
[1] I learned this a along time ago watching technicians use buggy software. Over time the number of crashes and bug reports declined not because the bugs were found and fixed but because the techs unconsciously learned how to use to software in ways that didn't expose bugs.
It's cheaper and lower risk to hire a contractor to provide a solution to a problem when the contractor has domain knowledge, tools and code to provide a solution. Forcing him to create a solution out of whole cloth is just dumb. More expensive and comes with a much higher risk of failure and slipped deadlines. There are a ton of customers that only care that a solution was provided and have no economic interest in the software itself.
Working with a codebase you're familiar with has a few advantages. You are using a worked out API which allows you to customize it without writting yet another broken wheel API from scratch. You know where bugs are, and you often avoid exposing existing but unknown bugs due to habit[1].
[1] I learned this a along time ago watching technicians use buggy software. Over time the number of crashes and bug reports declined not because the bugs were found and fixed but because the techs unconsciously learned how to use to software in ways that didn't expose bugs.