Software development topics I've changed my mind on

> Most won't care about the craft. Cherish the ones that do, meet the rest where they are

> (…)

> People who stress over code style, linting rules, or other minutia remain insane weirdos to me. Focus on more important things.

What you call “stressing over minutiae” others might call “caring for the craft”. Revered artisans are precisely the ones who care for the details. “Stressing” is your value judgement, not necessarily the ground truth.

What you’re essentially saying is “cherish the people who care up to the level I personally and subjectively think is right, and dismiss everyone who cares more as insane weirdos who cannot prioritise”.

There is more than one type of people who stress over code style. There's the group who wants to discuss about how to style your code and then there's the group who wants to just use a common code formatter and be done with that.

For example, I have objections to rustfmt's default style. I would never start discussions on rust projects about changing that to another formatter or changing its configuration. I definitely would carefully ask that people should really use rustfmt, though, if they don't do so yet.

Edit: This comment was based on misreading the parent comment. I've left it up, but I should have been more careful.

You've set yourself up to always be the outlier. To always need to have that discussion or tweak the rules on every project you work with.

You've increased the overhead of onboarding anyone used to the default style. You've increased the overhead of you working on anyone else's projects that is more likely to have the default style.

All of that is friction introduced because you haven't learned to live with the default style.

Do I love that the default C# rules put a new line before the else block? No, but I've learned to live with it so that I can work on all manner of projects without fussing over that style option every time.

By adhering to default rules, you never have to have the endless arguments such as tabs vs spaces again. ( Spaces won, and the tabbers got over it fairly quickly once it was the default in almost all formatters. )