Learnings from 5 years of tech startup code audits

Re:Learnings from 5 years of tech startup code audits by icedchai on Thursday May 26, 2022 @09:46AM (#31518267)

I worked at a company that was mired in tech debt. At least 4 different UI frameworks were in use, one of which was totally not supported. Multiple versions of the app were left accessible, with links from the new to the old, because the new version was not feature complete. "Feature flags" were expressed in at least 3 different ways. It was a nightmare to figure out if something was on or off, and why. The back end was based on a non supported language version, with several old, deprecated third-party packages as a result. The company appeared organized, superficially, but at the lower levels of implementation it was a total dumpster fire.

They were constantly "pivoting", but leaving the old junk around.

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Re:Learnings from 5 years of tech startup code audits by redisman on Thursday May 26, 2022 @11:55AM (#31519908)

There’s tech debt and then there’s poor engineering leadership. There’s no valid reason for a startup looking for market fit to switch frameworks or feature flags multiple times unless you’re just being clueless and looking for silver bullets. Just pick a few “boring” technologies and you’ll be perfectly capable of building anything “web” for at least a decade without messing around .

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Re:Learnings from 5 years of tech startup code audits by icedchai on Thursday May 26, 2022 @12:44PM (#31520522)

You are right, but there's always folks pushing for a "better" framework, even if the same old boring stuff works. If one of them is fairly vocal and a little bit persuasive, a new project will start using it... on and on it goes.

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