Repeating Yourself Thrice Doesn’t Turn You into a 3x Developer

Re:Repeating Yourself Thrice Doesn’t Turn You into a 3x Deve... by simonw on Sunday July 30, 2023 @01:23PM (#36933580)

"There is a limit to how many lines of code a single person can maintain."

I used to believe that, but I don't think it holds true any more.

The trick is to write code with automated tests and comprehensive documentation.

If you do this, you can leave projects in a state where you can pick them up in the future as if you weren't the original author.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Repeating Yourself Thrice Doesn’t Turn You into a 3x Deve... by lovasoa on Sunday July 30, 2023 @02:25PM (#36934357)

It's true that if all the code works well, is tested and all the features are supposed to stay the way they were when the code was written, then, any developer can maintain any amount of code, there is just nothing to do.

The problem arises when there is a change in what we want the code to do. Changing a feature that is implemented over three codebases in three different languages is definitely much more work than updating something that was written in SQLPage, for instance.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Repeating Yourself Thrice Doesn’t Turn You into a 3x Deve... by lovasoa on Monday July 31, 2023 @03:37AM (#36939734)

Oh, I hadn't noticed your username! On the topic of maintenance: could you have a look at this pull request I opened three years ago on a repo of yours : https://github.com/simonw/datasette/pull/1159 ?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Repeating Yourself Thrice Doesn’t Turn You into a 3x Deve... by simonw on Monday July 31, 2023 @02:57PM (#36947229)

Hah, wow, it looks like I've been procrastinating on making a decision if I like that or not for three years!

I'll add it to the Datasette 1.0 milestone so it definitely gets my attention before shipping that release.

[ Parent | on HN ]