Working in the software industry, circa 1989

Re:Working in the software industry, circa 1989 by twright0 on Monday July 11, 2022 @02:07PM (#32059558)

> The principle dev reviewed every single commit and enforced a consistency across the code base that was better than what any tools ever could have done.

How was it so much better that it justified that level of busywork on the part of the senior member of the team (and busywork for everyone else, to fix the style nits they enforced in review)? I would have guessed that taking a few hours to install and configure a formatting linter to free up the principal dev's time to focus on other things would have been hugely high leverage.

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Re:Working in the software industry, circa 1989 by com2kid on Monday July 11, 2022 @02:32PM (#32059898)

It ensured not only consistency of style, but also consistency of ideas. Every file was structured similarly, impedance mismatches were minimized, work across the entire code base was organized and unified. Junior engineers got a chance to talk to the principle developer about every commit they made, and accordingly their abilities as software engineers skyrocketed.

Developers quickly set their IDEs to follow the team's coding guidelines, style wasn't really a problem.

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Re:Working in the software industry, circa 1989 by beckingz on Monday July 11, 2022 @02:12PM (#32059639)

Reading every commit seems like the best short term way to maintain code quality and keep the whole project in your head?

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