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”.

The solution is to have computers enforce the code style. Pick a linter, pick a set of rules, and then forget about them.

Things I beleive:

- If you're picking up on code-style in PRs then your toolchain is backward.

- If you're changing linting rules every month then you're focussed on the wrong things

- It's better to have a consistent style than a perfect style

This is what we did with clang-format on our code base.

The result is occasionally ugly code and nobody is 100% happy but at least it's consistent.

Gofmt's style is no one's favorite, yet gofmt is everyone's favorite.[1]

[1] https://go-proverbs.github.io/