Show me a Montgomery Scott or Miles O’Brien and we can talk…

I might be in the minority, but I get more excited about the idea of maintaining/working on some creaky old legacy code base than I do about the idea of starting a new project from scratch.

I love doing that…

Right, it’s Sisko’s “It’s easy to be an angel in paradise…” from season 1. That’s the main theme of the whole show - how do the Federation’s ideals hold up in significantly less than ideal conditions? What does it mean to be “the good guys” when all of the choices in front of you are varying degrees of bad?

People always mention the later seasons, understandably so, but it carries through the entire series. In some ways, it’s even more prominent in the early seasons when DS9 is portrayed as being pretty remote, Federation back up is far away, the main cast is own their own, and the Cardassian fleet is always nearby.

It’s about time!

I’ve definitely had the experience of something being broken in Prod… and no one can reproduce it in Dev.

Guess where we are fixing it!?

I used two self-tapping sheet metal screws when we moved from a single-plate-on-the-back state to a double-plate state.

There’s no holder but…. That’s pretty much decorative anyway.

I think that, in many cases, “what” and “why” are very similar to each other or are closely related.

I’ve had an experience like this on more than one occasion - I come into an established code base for the first time. I’m working on a new feature/refactor/bug fix. I am reading through a function that is relevant to me, scratching my head a bit, and thinking “I think I see what this function is doing, but why did they do it such a screwy way?” Often there are no comments to give me any clues.

In the past, I have foolishly changed the code, thinking that I knew better… But what often happens is that I soon discover why my predecessor did something that looked so weird to me. They weren’t stupid - there was a reason for it! And then I end up putting it back…

Point being, in a situation like that the “what” and the “why” are going to have a lot of overlap. So, personally, I try to write comments that highlight assumptions that won’t be obvious from reading the code, external constraints that matter but don’t actually show up in the code, and so on.

I am far from perfect at it and I probably don’t write enough comments. But when I do, I try to write comments that will be reminders to myself, or fill in gaps in context for some hypothetical new person. I try to avoid comments that literally explain the code unless it’s particularly (and unavoidably) complex.

Glory to you and your house!

“Why” comments make more sense as application complexity grows.

You also have to consider interaction of the code with other external systems - sometimes external APIs force you to write code in ways you might not otherwise and it’s good to leave a trail for others on your team (and your future self…) about what was going on there.

I know this may be an unpopular opinion on lemmy, which leans so heavily towards Linux and FOSS, and I’m a Linux user myself but….

I actually really like C# and .NET (the modern cross-platform version anyway).

And this is why mocks are bad…

Ah, the list of required skills on the last job posting I looked at…

O’Brien is my favorite character in all of Trek. And as much as part of me would like to see him again, sometimes a character’s story is over and that’s ok!

I generally agree with the idea that code should be as simple as it can be to accomplish the goal of the code… I just haven’t been convinced that Clean Code is the way to get there, necessarily. The book does contain some good advice , to be sure, but I wouldn’t call it universal by any means.

I also think TDD is a very optimistic strategy that just doesn’t match up with reality terribly often.

Actually, I think that’s what confuses me the most about all of Uncle Bob’s books. I’ve read a couple of them and thought, “All this sounds great but real world development just doesn’t seem to work that way.” Like, all of his advice is for best case scenarios that I certainly haven’t encountered in my career.

I say confusing, because surely he’s been in the profession long enough to have seen the disconnect between what he’s preaching and real life, right???

Oof…

Grim Dawn.

I love SNES Starfleet Academy. I played battles in the simulator mode over and over again so many times as a kid.

Do we work together?

Turn based strategy games. Especially 4X games like Civilization or the Master of Magic remake.