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Be Aware of the Makefile Effect

(blog.yossarian.net)
431 points thunderbong | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.312s | source
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mcdeltat ◴[] No.42663837[source]
At my work I've noticed another contributing factor: tools/systems that devs need to interact with at some point, but otherwise provide little perceived value to learn day-to-day.

Example is build system and CI configuration. We absolutely need these but devs don't think they should be expected to deal with them day to day. CI is perceived as a system that should be "set and forget", like yeah we need it but really I have to learn all this just to build the app? Devs expect it to "just work" and if there are complexities then another team (AKA my role) deals with that. As a result, any time devs interact with the system, there's a high motivation to copy from the last working setup and move on with their day to the "real" work.

The best solution I see is meet the devs halfway. Provide them with tooling that is appropriate simple/complex for the task, provide documentation, minimise belief in "magic". Tools like Make kinda fail here because they are too complex and black-box-like.

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1. exitb ◴[] No.42663956[source]
The office coffee machine is not „set and forget”, but you wouldn’t expect the entire responsibility for it’s maintenance to be evenly distributed between all people that use it. Similarly, CI needs ownership and having it fall on the last developer that attempted to use it is not an efficient way of working.