I think the point is more that most of the hard work behind Twitter isn't in writing the "fancy" code at all - it's in developing the infrastructure that allows that code to safely propagate across Twitter's massive network of servers, and abstracting that complexity away so that the developers who make the "fancy" user-visible changes don't have to worry about it.

> Before doing so, please email me a bullet point summary of what your code commits have achieved in the past ~6 months, along with up to 10 screenshots of the most salient lines of code.

“Salient” is not a synonym of “fancy”.

In case of code, isn't it basically the same?

I mean, i spent 20 months working on a project for a bank recently. I had a lot of salient code at the beginning, fun little algorithms and cool regex.

The last iteration of the code i committed, the salient part was basically a lisp interpreter (if lisp was formatted like json), but everything else was plain and boring. The last issue i had is that the ES version was upgraded and the python library i used to connect to ES was version locked, and did not work.

I think that for the next 4 years, this will be the only type of modifications my SRE ex-collegue who now own the code will make. Still, it can take days.

Spending days figuring out a few boring lines of change that has an outsized impact would, imho, be a fairly compelling bit of code to show off. IMHO while he might be crazy and way out of line, he's effectively asking people to reinterview for their jobs, except instead of doing blind code tests he's asking them to show off the best work they've done recently.

So, for information: as the program was asked to do more and interface with more (and since the output formatting keep changing every semester), most of the code logic was deported in the configuration files.

Nothing really had any outsized impact in the last 12 months of the project imho. Once the minimum viable product was done, every bit of improvement i did was either simplifying, performance-related or adding more configurability (and test, and documentation).

I did a piece of code that adapted to the ES request that i really like and could be showed off, but it took me three weeks, but 90% of what i parametrized could be hardcoded and it would have changed nothing in the long run.

No, it’s not. In fact, if the fanciness of your code is the only thing that contributes its salience, that’s a negative.

10 lines of salient code could be the entry point into some subsystem you wrote, or where you integrate with another system. It wouldn’t look fancy but it’s salient.

I can see this making sense for type signatures and data structures—or class definitions, interface definitions. Not so sure about "entry points". Contracts, abstractions. Typical Haskell code would really lend itself to being summarized like this—typeclass instances, etc.

The linked article quotes a mail where Musk asks to see "the most salient lines of code".

Unfortunately, "salient" does not mean anything similar to "fancy", which invalidates the original grandparent's statement (unless you can cite something else).

As I didn't knew the word, I gave it to DeepL for translation and in German it translates to words which would be used for extraordinary and over-the-top things (herausragend, hervorragend, hervorstechend). If someone would have used these, I'd have understood it as a call to show my best code.