Software development topics I've changed my mind on

> People who stress over code style, lining

You can do it whatever way you want but match the style of the project. I've worked on too many projects where someone decides their way is best and you end up with a mix of everything.

If you want to change the code style, okay, but change it everywhere and don't forget to test everything you've changed.

> Frontend development is a nightmare

But is it weird I kind of enjoy it every so often/

> Elegance is not a real metric

You're dam right it's not! Next time someone proudly presents a super elegant, refined, and minimalistic solution I'm going to phone them at 3am on a Saturday and get them to debug it while screaming at them about lost revenue or something.

> DynamoDB is the worst possible choice for general application development

Oh man, the amount of times I've seen some form of noSql and it's used as a relational database. 9/10 some rendition of SQL is more than sufficient.

I've grown to be a big fan of opinionated linters like gofmt, rustfmt, black etc. They avoid so much time spent disagreeing about code formatting and personal preferences. Instead engineers can do mutual grumbling sessions about weird formatting choices they see it do, and move on.

Code style is one thing - formatting that is - but there's others like how features are implemented tend to change over time and with different developers as well, which is difficult to automatically test and hard to keep in line except with good code reviews, but for that to work you already need to install a culture of consistency, which also means that innovation may be stifled and developers demotivated (e.g. because the better solution requires the 100 existing solutions to be rewritten, which is too expensive or requires a whole team to be blocked until it's done).

Consistency trumps a lot of things IMO, but not everyone is on board with that... myself included, I'm guilty of breaking with my own consistency all the time.

black sucks. Everytime you bump version it will reformat all of your already formatted code.

If your product maintains different versions you won't be able to cherry pick changes across versions.

If I didn't want to have opinions, I would join a cult.

save your opinions for the things that really matter instead of another bikeshed to build! (not telling you to shut up, btw :) )

You're welcome to your opinions, I don't stop engineers I'm working with from having opinions about the code formatting. It's still going to be formatted by the opinionated formatter.

Having one gets us into the "Well, it's not quite what I want but at least it's consistent", and it gets rid of arguments that don't really provide anywhere near the amount of value engineers feel they do. There are almost always significantly better and more productive things to be spending time figuring out.