I’ve worked in a few startups, and it always annoys me when people say they don’t have time to do it right. You don’t have time not to do it right - code structure and clarity is needed even as a solo dev, as you say, for future you. Barfing out code on the basis of “it works, so ship it” you’ll be tied up in your own spaghetti in a few months. Hence the traditional clean-sheet rewrite that comes along after 18-24 months that really brings progress to its knees.
Ironically I just left the startup world for a larger more established company and the code is some of the worst I’ve seen in a decade. e.g. core interface definitions without even have a sentence explaining the purpose of required functions. Think “you’re required to provide a function called “performControl()”, but to work out its responsibilities you’re going to have to reverse-engineer the codebase”. Worst of all this unprofessional crap is part of that ground-up 2nd attempt rewrite.
Ironically I just left the startup world for a larger more established company and the code is some of the worst I’ve seen in a decade. e.g. core interface definitions without even have a sentence explaining the purpose of required functions. Think “you’re required to provide a function called “performControl()”, but to work out its responsibilities you’re going to have to reverse-engineer the codebase”. Worst of all this unprofessional crap is part of that ground-up 2nd attempt rewrite.
I think this is actually quite common in commercial code. At least, for most of the code I’ve seen. Which is why I laugh most of the time when people imply commercial code is better than most open source code. It’s not, you just cannot see it.
When people read my code, they usually say they like that I comment so much, it makes it easier to understand what’s happening.
I say, I comment so much because my memory is terrible. It’s for me!
I’ve worked in a few startups, and it always annoys me when people say they don’t have time to do it right. You don’t have time not to do it right - code structure and clarity is needed even as a solo dev, as you say, for future you. Barfing out code on the basis of “it works, so ship it” you’ll be tied up in your own spaghetti in a few months. Hence the traditional clean-sheet rewrite that comes along after 18-24 months that really brings progress to its knees.
Ironically I just left the startup world for a larger more established company and the code is some of the worst I’ve seen in a decade. e.g. core interface definitions without even have a sentence explaining the purpose of required functions. Think “you’re required to provide a function called “performControl()”, but to work out its responsibilities you’re going to have to reverse-engineer the codebase”. Worst of all this unprofessional crap is part of that ground-up 2nd attempt rewrite.
I think this is actually quite common in commercial code. At least, for most of the code I’ve seen. Which is why I laugh most of the time when people imply commercial code is better than most open source code. It’s not, you just cannot see it.
Yikes. Ever heard of documentation??
What do you think comments are?