I have since found that people still really don't want to do that work, are grateful when I will do it, and (except for one instance) management recognizes it as important, slow, tedious work. The only issue I have is that it gets boring, and so 80% of the effort goes into motivating myself to get it done ;)

Then on the other end I once automated a process ('running a report') that took one of the senior Devs at that place an entire day to compile in: exactly one day. Suddenly that report could be run when people actually needed it (once a month) but they only ran it every half year because of cost and blocking a resource for an entire day.

Your case feels like it might be somewhere in between (given I have zero context/actual knowledge of what these updates are/why they can't be centralized somehow. Has anyone tried?

I personally have gone in the opposite direction, where I spend most of my time making sure I'm not going to cause irreversible damage, and then just letting the not-critical bugs into the wild, because I'd rather ship a flawed product now and get feedback on it from actual users, than wait to ship a product until it's "perfect" and get no feedback until then.

But I respect the hell out of what you're describing here, because for every one of me, there needs to be one of you. The trick, in my experience, is getting you and I to work happily together. It's very difficult, but when it works, it's wonderful for both of us.

I just wrote a "guiding principle" for my dev team that reads:

"As long as a risk doesn't have catastrophic (irreversible) harm severity (consequences), it may be worth allowing the risk to actualize before attempting to mitigate or eliminate it."

I'm guessing you'd hate that? Any way I could make it marginally more tolerable?

But whoa that's quite the story. I suspect that you are a godsend for the typical startup which will probably tend to be on the "physically sick from looking at the code" side of things and you are gonna pull in the other direction. In the end the startup would end up in a great 'middle ground' if neither side quits in frustration over the other.

Which is basically what your parent says is the hard part. To balance it out.

There's a lot of 'good enough' code and functionality you can 'get away with' that will actually be useful for your customers. And they can get it and use it now and not in 1 year from now. What is missing in a lot of companies is the 'sticking with it' meaning actually not just throwing the MVP out there and leaving it but collecting and _acting on_ that user feedback. Which is next to impossible with sickening code but easy enough with '80/20 rule code'.

That's how I started working a a static website. I have been working on it for a few years now. I have realised my strength is that I can work on a problem for a very long time. My website solves a lot of very tiny problems one by one. Nothing impressive when you look at them individually. However after solving hundreds of them a big picture starts emerging.

When I was younger I wanted to solve very hard problems. I have let that idea go and have no regret about it.

A worthy life goal. I feel that way, myself.

On the other hand, it very much depends on the developer in question. I'd say roughly 50% of the devs who claim to be in your category are, in fact, wasting dev cycles on pedantic things that have no impact on the end user. As an example, I had one developer take 6 months to build a (relatively simple) top nav for a web app. This shouldn't have taken more than 1-2 weeks, even with a careful eye for detail.

Oh, you mean "bikeshedding."

Here's an example of the difference between basic quality, and High Quality:

If you look at most of the repos for SPM modules in my portfolio[0], you'll see that the vast majority have test harnesses. I prefer using test harnesses[1].

These test harnesses tend to be pretty damn robust apps. Many are "ready for app store" robust. A lot of folks would just publish them, "as is." I've been writing apps for a very long time. I'm pretty good at this.

I can write a fairly decent test harness, with full app capabilities, in less than a day. If I take the time to localize it, maybe add a day or so.

Here's an example of some test harnesses[2]. Note that there are four of them. These represent the four different target environments for Apple (iOS/iPadOS, WatchOS, TVOS, and MacOS). I'll probably need to fork iOS and iPadOS, in the future, but we're not there, yet. A single codebase is still good for both (But I hope that SwiftUI makes supporting multiple platforms easier. We'll see...).

They test a Bluetooth framework[3].

It probably took me around a week or so, to write each one. They are pretty damn good. I deliberately went "over the top," with them, because I like to exemplify what I consider halfway decent Quality coding practices. I think they are all "App Store ready."

I decided to actually go ahead, and create a set of apps, based on these[4], [5], [6]. Here's the codebase for those apps[7].

I spent well over a month, on each, after merging over the test harness codebases, to make them ready for the App Store. Lots of UX testing, removing code that only applied to testing, and adding "friendlier" user interface. I didn't do much "eye candy," like animations. If I did that, then I probably would have spent another month on each. Animations tend to bring ... interesting ... bugs. I'm going through that, right now, with the app currently under development.

I'm working on an app that I started about a year ago. Actually, I started it over ten years ago, if you include the two servers that I wrote, upon which it depends.

One of the reasons that it has taken so long, is that I have truncated months of work, and tossed them in the garbage, because they were not the proper way to go. I have an "evolutionary design" process[8], that means this can happen. I plan for it. I've probably shitcanned three months' of work.

Another thing that I do, is have an "always beta" approach to Quality. I maintain the product at "incomplete, but ship Quality" status for as much of the project as possible. In fact, I've been sharing it with the team, using TestFlight External Testing, since Oct 3, 2020 at 7:47 AM (I got that from the TestFlight metadata). The initial Git checkin of the project was Sept. 4.

That means that the app has been stable and robust enough for user testing, and approval for basic App Store release (TestFlight External Testing is a more relaxed standard, but try pushing out a crasher, and see how far that goes).

I add localization support, accessibility, Dark Mode support, leak testing, etc., at every turn. It's very useful, because I can solicit immediate feedback from non-tech team members. It also means that the "basics" for App Store release are constantly being tested and validated.

Even more useful, if we want to ask for money, it's dam easy. We just loop the person we're begging from, into the TestFlight External Tester pool, and they can run the app without a Marketing chaperone, or sacrifices to the demo gods. We can also get valuable feedback from them.

It's really, really nice, and it has been, for many months.

I feel like we are now at a "starting point." Even though it has been a fully-functioning, release-ready app for the last couple of months, it still needs the "MVP treatment," where the testing pool is expanded, and we start applying it to "in the wild" scenarios. We've kept it to a small user pool, so far.

Lots of companies use their customers as guinea pigs for the first several releases; usually by shoving baling-wire-and-duct-tape junk down their throats (and making them pay for it), before hitting their stride. It's a deliberate strategy. Some months ago, I read a post, here, by a founder, declaring that "if you don't get physically sick at the quality of the code in your MVP, then you are spending too much time on code quality."

Basically, deliberately write garbage, and force it on your users. This has the very significant disadvantage of establishing a foundation of sand. Everyone always plans to "go back and do it right," but that never actually happens. That "physically sickening" MVP is the product for life.

One of the reasons that I took on this project, was the founder is a friend of mine. He is running it as an NPO (501c3), and putting his own money into it. He doesn't really have much of it, to begin with. Also, more alarmingly, he didn't actually have a particularly good idea of what, exactly, he wanted the app to be. That's a recipe for disaster.

He asked me to help him vet some development shops he was approaching, to realize his vision.

It was eye-opening. He got a number of ridiculous quotes. I know what is necessary for this type of project (not small). For example, when one said that they'll deliver a full multi-server, multi-client app for MVP in three months (firm), upon getting a vague, hand-wavy requirements spec, it was hard for me to keep a straight face. The most honest one, was one that quoted a valid price (six figures, and minimum six months), then basically said "come back when you know what you want." I respected that one.

After a few of these, I just got disgusted, and said "Screw this. I'll do it." I've been developing it for free, as a native iOS/iPadOS app. We have refined the specification and mission, as the app has progressed. Having a high-quality, ship-ready prototype, goes a long way towards developing a good app.

He has to pinch himself.

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/story/chrismarshall

[1] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/testing-harness-vs-u...

[2] https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_BlueThoth/tree/mas...

[3] https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_BlueThoth

[4] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/blue-van-clef-for-mobile/id151... (iOS -Includes Watch app)

[5] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/blue-van-clef/id1529005127 (Mac)

[6] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/blue-van-clef-for-tv/id1529181... (TV)

[7] https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/BlueVanClef

[8] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/evolutionary-design-...

While exaggerated, I'd definitely agree. If you don't quite know yet where exactly your company will pivot to in the next year or whether the company will still exist, it doesn't make sense to optimize for code quality - but for product-market fit instead.

> Everyone always plans to "go back and do it right," but that never actually happens. That "physically sickening" MVP is the product for life.

After having raised an 8 M Series A and hiring some more developers and UX experts, we're currently rewriting most of our app code. It's not an automatism that the bad code gets built on for eternity.

Take a look at my work. Feel free to browse the commit logs, and see how fast I write it. I "put it all out there."

It's quite possible to do very high-quality work, in very little time.

Just maybe not from folks just out of code bootcamp.

And...just to make it clear. I'm not looking for work. My dance card is very full, with the work I'm doing for free.

The same is true for resource requirements and performance. People complain about their OS (windows, macos, sometimes linux or some VM), and that it takes 1 whole minute to boot, while some projects take a couple of minutes to start.

A whole minute would drive me insane. We should not be waiting this long for computers to turn on.

I read once that to be a good general practitioner physician, you have to kind of like dealing with bad breath and... well, it was a disgusting sentence, and you get all the info you need from the first half, so no need to take it further. But in a similar way, I kind of like totally messed up data sources.

I'm working right now on writing a shell script to exhaustively test a particular use case, because actually exhaustively testing it would (probably) take longer than writing the script. I'm doing this knowing full well that the next time this comes up two years from now, I'm probably not going to remember where I put this script, so I'll probably have to re-create it, but that's ok - because writing "boring" shell scripts is actually something I enjoy.

Because they take so long and/or are so brittle, it's easier to just keep them on the side and update them when needed rather than deal with the back and forth on that in a project with a lot of code churn (i.e. when updating or retrofitting a legacy project). Once again, it's not ideal but it's better than nothing.

Beyond this it's just personal/team preference though.

At work, I've found I work best with fast moving get-it-done types. They push me to accept imperfect work, and I've learned to see the value in that. I polish the imperfect stuff, and signal to the team when a "boring" quality improvement really could reap benefits.