I think a good general rule is: for a single sentence, not capitalizing the first letter (and not using a period) is fine. Longer than that and it both makes parsing more difficult and looks strongly like an affectation. There is a practical purpose for sentence start/end punctuation.
Fundamentally, no-one likes working with other people's code or solutions. They always think that they'd have done it better if they'd had the chance.
I do two things to dig out of this particular hole:
- Have some (relatively) objective standards by which I judge code/a project
- Have some empathy for people who were probably just doing their best, in the most multivariate sense ("I wrote this in Clojure so I didn't burn out", "I had to ship this in three days and I was just back from paternity leave", "I was onboarding a junior engineer and dumped this spaghetti in a spare 3 hours to mollify an important client"
#2 is very useful because it snaps me out of contempt and helps prevent me from spreading that culture to the engineers around me. But #1 is actionable in that when I do get time to "do things right" I have some values to aim at. Mostly they're:
- Does this code build/respect a coherent mental model of the problem space
- Is it possible to represent invalid state
- Are surprises/pitfalls noted (I'm not a big commenter in general, but this is a case where I find them useful)
- Does this code consider likely engineer workflows (e.g. is it easy to add another case to handle, is it easy to enable debugging, etc.)
Notably none of these are like, "methods are too long" or "variable names are too short" or whatever. I find orthodoxies like these just serve to create in/out groups and have no impact on code quality. Or, another way to say this is that if you're building a coherent mental model, your methods are probably the right size.
I dislike this generalization, as it doesn't go down to the gist: Solutions that adhere to "some" well-known patterns or ways to build things are more likely to be accepted by other fellow developers.
Me, personally, can happily work with other people's code or solutions. :)
I think there's a frequent cause to this... It's difficult to know the requirements and constraints in place when that code or solution came to be. Many of us would have done something very similar, at least in spirit, under the same conditions. But those conditions constantly change and we tend to judge solutions based on current conditions. Try judging your own solutions by current conditions years after developing them and they sometimes won't look as good as you remember then being. When doing that, it's tempting to think "but x wasn't available and we didn't know y." With other people's solutions, we often lack the knowledge to be aware of those justifications. Investigating to find some of those justifications has helped me better figure out when replacing something is the right or wrong thing to do.
but yes, this is the lament of the senior developer or manager. the ideal is that people have the freedom to explore, and that they feel good for figuring things out, but that ultimately they're subtley shepharded such that they don't fall into infinite gravity wells or crash the ship along the way.
What irritated me was the underlying sound that programmers of category 1 are always building bad solutions and programmer 2 has to fight to save the day. It feels like this person has worked to long in a bad position and started to see the world in this simple black and white form.
To be fair I’ve been there before myself. I maintain a ton of build pipelines and build tools. And for a while I had the world view of them against me. Them, who by design create bad build scripts which never scale and never survive a second use-case change and me, the unsung hero who fights the verbal battle why one should not write build output into the build source directory etc.
For me it boiled down to understand that these other people where not standing in line to make my life harder. They simply didn’t know or had no capacity to learn this because they also had their fair share of problems in their respective domains etc.
I think there is some good information in this post. But I would have liked if it had been wrapped differently.