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Software development topics I've changed my mind on

(chriskiehl.com)
873 points belter | 2 comments | 05 Feb 25 09:50 UTC | HN request time: 0.4s | source
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ZaoLahma ◴[05 Feb 25 12:38 UTC] No.42947654[source]▶
> Most programming should be done long before a single line of code is written

Nah.

I (16+ years developer) prefer to iteratively go between coding and designing. It happens way too often that when you're coding, you stumble across something that makes you go "oh f me, that would NEVER work", which forces you to approach a problem entirely differently.

Quite often you also have eureka moments with better solutions that just would not have happened unless you had code in front of you, which again makes you approach the problem entirely differently.

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Kichererbsen ◴[05 Feb 25 14:10 UTC] No.42948683[source]▶
Most programming is actually figuring out what already exists and what (and more importantly: why) the requirements are. This is best done long before a single line of code is written.

I think the author is taking a wider view of "programming" than the actual writing of code as the end product. Some of the most important work I've done is spend the time to argue that something doesn't need to be done at all.

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polishdude20 ◴[05 Feb 25 19:44 UTC] No.42954021[source]▶
This makes me think it would be really cool to tie code sections to slack conversations or emails. There's always commit messages yes, but most product decisions on why something was done lives in slack at least where I've worked.

Even an AI tool that takes a slack thread and summarizes how that thread informed the code would be cool to try.

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1. dhosek ◴[05 Feb 25 20:10 UTC] No.42954422[source]▶
I always fight to get this stuff into JIRA (or whatever equivalent tool we’re using), and then make sure that all commits have the JIRA ID in them.
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2. Izkata ◴[05 Feb 25 22:48 UTC] No.42956468[source]▶
Works great until you're not using it anymore. We're on our third system, all the cases from the first one and most from the second one are long since gone. Meanwhile the commit messages survive it all, even across cvs -> svn and svn -> git migrations.