News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Absolute truths I unlearned as junior developer by criley2 on Friday June 07, 2019 @11:01AM (#20125235)
>If you think "All code must be perfect" then you're not a pro yet

Or they're a pro in a very different field than you.

When I worked in web development, I was gobsmacked at what professionals considered "good enough to ship". Now that I work in Medical EHR, the standards for 'good enough to ship' when lives could be on the line is very, very, very different.

I imagine a NASA engineer creating famously low-defect code or perhaps an engineer creating control systems for a nuclear power plant would similarly look at our medical code and think we too ship far too many hacks and defects.

Re:Absolute truths I unlearned as junior developer by onion2k on Friday June 07, 2019 @11:41AM (#20125676)
People in fields where they write code that has to be proven can still know when it's appropriate to write bad hacky code. If they believe "I write proven code for my EHR system therefore all code must be like that." I would argue they're not pros.

Being a professional is knowing how to do your job well. Applying a single heuristic to every problem isn't that.

Re:Absolute truths I unlearned as junior developer by spambucket81 on Friday June 07, 2019 @09:06PM (#20129940)
> If you think "All code must be perfect" then you're not a pro yet.

> Applying a single heuristic to every problem isn't that.

How ironic :)

Re:Absolute truths I unlearned as junior developer by chrisfinazzo on Friday June 07, 2019 @11:29AM (#20125530)
I'm surprised this hasn't come up yet, but the following should be required reading. I don't want to invoke "we follow orders or people die" (or blow up), but...

https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

Re:Absolute truths I unlearned as junior developer by chimpburger on Friday June 07, 2019 @06:23PM (#20129172)
That's the point. The context of the code matters. 99% of code is not critical to life. Applying NASA level of rigor to every line of code ever written is an indication of mental disorder (autistic obsession)