I tweeted this yesterday and the response was not good.
Tell me your unpopular opinion. Lighthearted only.
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
I tweeted this yesterday and the response was not good.
Tell me your unpopular opinion. Lighthearted only.
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
Michael Tharrington -
Michael Tharrington -
Ihor Kuzmanenko -
Best Codes -
Oldest comments (312)
unit testing can sometimes be overlooked... :v <3
Devs can build their portfolios on WordPress
This is a great one.
Wordpress isn't exactly an "elegant solution" these days, but it is a hardened one with basically every use case imaginable covered. Any user-facing flaws can be overcome with tooling and config, same as any comparable software.
It's also very useful to learn Wordpress. The company behind Wordpress just raised another $300m. The software isn't going anywhere any time soon.
True Ben.
Headless Wordpress with Gatsby kind of well optimised frontend will be a killer combo for mid sized projects
Use cases,
Can second this. Been building a full-stack app for a few months now using WP as the backend + GraphQL API and React Frontend. Also use some serverless functions to supplement functionality that can't be done in WP.
It's been amazing because as a single dev, I can work on what would otherwise be a huge/impossible project by leveraging WPs' CMS, authentication features and plugins.
The only thing slowing me down is the WordPress GraphQL ecosystem is still almost non-existent
I'm going to be looking into Gatsby and next.js this year. One question - how do you handle updates on Gatsby when a post or something else is updated in WordPress? Do you have a hook/action that is triggered and posts to gatsby to run a new build?
I used wordpress once in 2003 but I haven't built a single wordpress site ever since!
I recognise what people have done with it, and it's maturity as a platform, but I count myself lucky!
Mine is even more primitive. I use a static site generator. Lol
Too many plugins, not enough code I can modify without fear.
I've had one on WP for years now. I'm switching to hosting everything on a GitHub pages site. It's just far easier to maintain with little effort. Helps focus on writing rather than messing with a WP set up.
Super high coverage testing is sometimes a waste of time 😬
For every metric, there is an equal and opposite metric.
Test coverage is good to know and track, but it can hide problems if it isn't a factor considered alongside a lot of principles and qualitative decision making.
Yes exactly; test coverage isn't the goal in itself and I think sometimes focusing too much on a percentage coverage is a distraction from creating an actual robust pipeline.
See also: snapshot testing in the frontend. Very easy to achieve close to 100% coverage with tests that are easily ignored and overwritten when they fail 🙄
100% coverage of low quality tests is so much worse than 20% critical tests.
Who writes the tests to test the tests?? 😵
Coast guard.
Mutation testing
Many, many times.
That said, if you are publishing libraries that are meant to be reused (e.g. on PyPI, or NPM), 100% is often a good idea.
💯 coverage is usually an indicator of highly coupled testing, which leads to very fragile tests, which leads to the tests being turned off...
Which leads to anger, anger leads to hate, and hate leads to suffering.
Basic for loops in JavaScript are fine.
Depends what you're using then for. For performing operations on every element of an array or object, Array.prototype.map is really nice. But I definitely agree that for loops as opposed to Array.prototype.map, reduce and for each are never really bad; they're just sometimes not the best.
As soon as you need to have async code in your
forEachcallback you need to switch your code to the for loop again. So if there is any chance this might happen, pick it right away...Nope, you can Promise.all()
How,
.forEachdoesn't collect the returned value, you would need to switch to.mapand there are quite some cases where you don't want to fire all of these things "at once".Then you can use await and Array.prototype.reduce. It sounds a bit awkward but is actually straightforward.
I'm not sure I get your point (or whether you got mine), so I'll put some code:
Independent of using
maporreduceto iterate over an array, the "aaync callback" will return the promise immediately for every item.(Even the function that contains the
await Promise.allwill immediately return with a promise, of course)The implication is that you can not run those async actions in a sequence using the methods provided by
Array.protype.Meaning
urls.map(fetch)is the same asurls.map(async (url) => await fetch(url))and it's not different from usingreduceto create that Array of Promises.But
Will only trigger the second fetch after the first one is done.
I have had plenty of experience where servers have blocked to many simultaneous requests, so it's worth considering the impact the code can have.
(If that's not clear I'm willing to take the time to write a post about it.)
I really don't like seeing people using .map for things not returning a new array. The whole concept of "mapping" comes from functional languages, or even higher, from mathematics, and always have been about "mapping" one set (your input) to another (the returned array). Discarding the output and using map as a glorified for loop makes the intention unclear.
Full Stack Devs really exist.
What is a full stack dev? A "jack of all trades"?
Yes, we exist. I design, write markup, styles, and handle back-end code and design database models.
But can you solder? 😜
One of the fun games to play with people who call themselves full-stack devs is to see just how "full" their stack is. So often it's just a bit of JS and PHP.
I can solder 😂😂
Exactly, I have also seen bad examples of full stack. But that doesn't change the fact.
I ask because I think people use the terms "front-end developer," "back-end developer," "full-stack developer," "Java developer," etc. in different ways.
Sometimes an "XYZ developer" term seems to describe the skill set possessed by a developer, and other times it is used to describe the specialization area of a developer.
When talking about skill sets, the term "full-stack" makes some sense to me: it emphasizes that a developer has learned a little about a lot and is comfortable diving deeper anywhere, including new territory.
But when talking about focus areas or areas of specialization, I think the term "full-stack" can be confusing: it seems to say "I'm good at everything," but a) that's not true, and b) every tech stack is different.
Also, the terms "front-end" and "back-end" refer to different things depending on if we're talking about web development or not.
Personally, the only modifier I tend to use with the terms "developer" and "engineer" is "software." Anything more feels like I'm putting myself in a box, and it might be hard to get out of later on.
"I'm a software engineer with ___ experience using ___ technologies, and I want to learn more about ___ by working on ___." More verbose, perhaps, but also a more accurate characterization of myself.
I think you've hit the nail on the head. Web Devs too quickly silo themselves into front or back-end and limit themselves to understanding only part of the product they're working on.
So often I've seen features implemented in the wrong place in the stack. Not because the Dev was bad, because they didn't want to learn a language on the "other side" of the stack.
This should be more than doable for an average Dev (being multilingual is, after all, a thing) but for some reason the REST API seems to represent a cultural divide between the front-enders and back-enders and us full-stack Devs are viewed suspiciously by both.
SOLID, TDD, Agile, all apply to both "sides" of the stack. It's certainly possible to be a good Dev on both sides - so long as you don't measure being a good dev as simply someone who can remember all the native functions in that language.
This is not so uncommon. There are a lot of people who can program the client all the way to Assembly. The question is, is this an efficient way to work in a project?
Depends.
If your team and project scopes are small, hiring "full-stacks" make sense. There simply wouldn't be enough work for a full-time front-end developer in many places.
However, I've also seen places hiring a full-stack in hopes or getting rid of the need for an actual front-end developer for their product. Or hiring front-end devs who can use Firebase in hopes they won't need a back-end.
This rarely works, and when it does, it does quite poorly.
I think that while they do exist, they all tend to have a specialty and, more importantly, relatively important shortcomings. I've yet to meet an actual full-stack that doesn't suck at one part of the stack, be it CSS, server configuration, DevOps, whatever.
Myself included. I suck at doing responsive layouts.
You need a BSc in computer science to be a good developer
I'm not sure that's an unpopular opinion today.
I agree. It's not unpopular but just wrong...
Counter unpopular opinion: being a good developer has less to do with your knowledge of computing science (e.g. algorithms, runtime complexity, hard maths), than your ability to communicate your solutions to complex problems in non-technical ways.
What if you just watch computer science lectures from universities. I can't afford to go back to uni I'd be 200yrs old before I paid that off.
A lot of them have BSc in something else, a lot of them have no BSc at all. So it's not unpopular it's in fact untrue. Although I have BSc in IT which is a bit different, most of my knowledge comes from work or learning by myself in spare time. Now I know more people without BSc in computer science that are way better than me.
It's not defending something it's just a good argument. Don't remember that many popular developers that had BSc while becoming famous. basically I want to argue that you can learn outside of university.
Yes I think that's definitely the growing sentiment these days, that CS degrees (and many other degrees to be fair) are becoming less necessary for one to be considered "good" in one's field.
The two main reasons I believe are responsible:
1) economic reasons: tertiary education costs have inflated to absolutely absurd levels (as a general observation, it also appears quality of teaching is declining). This leads to many people who want to learn CS-related topics, but aren't going to fork out $50k & 4 years to do so. Thus, the natural reaction is to self-teach.
2) It's taken far longer than expected, but the internet is finally providing the quality resources once monopolised by universities. Furthermore, web-based innovation is now occurring so rapidly that unis can't even keep up with the latest developments and industry practices.
These 2 trends combined together mean that a developers skill-level is becoming less coupled from their credentials and is instead more a result of one's drive, resourcefulness, and practical experience.
You need a BSc in CS to be a good computer scientist. But not every computer scientist is a good developer. Most good computer scientists I know are more of a mathematician than a dev.
Or as Paul Graham writes in Hackers and Painters: "Computer science is a grab bag of tenuously related areas thrown together by an accident of history, like Yugoslavia."
Hmm, never heard of that one but good to know how my region became like it is - thrown together by an accident of histroy xD.
Anyways exactly what might be the problem: software development != computer science. Some people mix these two so it might be the reason for confusion.
Unpopular by the way of being completely wrong.
I'm self taught and work with many "BSc in computer science" and several of them will look at my solutions to problems and go "woah you went all CS on us, this is gonna take my some time to review" and I'm like "dude it's just a graph".
Point being: you need CS knowledge to be good at CS, a degree is not a requirement and often not sufficient.
I think that having a BSc (and MSc, now that I'm bragging) in computer science made me a better developer, but I don't see how the ability to prove the NP-completeness of a problem is a requirement for being a good developer.
Native mobile development makes sense.
Are you telling that my job is an unpopular opinion ?
this makes me sad :(
Makes me sad to, there is so many tasks that are just better on native.
POC are likely the first production release
¯\(ツ)/¯
Haha yes
"we have a poc, so the Software is already complete. There is only some logic missing!"
Sad but true. I haven't been in the game long, but I feel like the whole "move fast, break things" mantra is often interpreted as "ship your prototypes."
Most software products I’ve seen have at least one feature that just screams “we have a demo on Monday, can you code this over the weekend?” And then that’s what goes to prod because there’s another demo on Friday for some other feature.
learned this the hard way
I would love to hear about your experience in this area.
Well latest one was like build this and that and we need demo up in 3 months. Next thing you know always new feature requests and as a must. After that they started talking about release in another 6 months and I was like heeelllll no. They agreed to build prototype and then rewrite the whole thing but I'm sure they think well it's only bug fixing and optimizing. The code is impossible to maintain so hope they understood last time what rewrite means
Man I think I just found my support group 😢
Scalability can be a premature optimization
It is, always.
Don't need it, yet doesn't come into it.
As long as it works... it's fine.
What context do you have in mind?
I think "it's fine if it works" makes sense for rapid prototyping, proof-of-concepts, and other "throw-away" code, but when it comes to code that will be shipped and therefore maintained, I lean towards "good enough to work is not good enough to ship."
Fully agree, since the statement without context could also be applied to social injustice that just works for most people.
😂😂😂 Making vague statements keeps me out of trouble 😂😂😂
True, though I meant more for personal growth etc... and not business needs because there always seems to be a pressure to do better or write less with "more advanced" languages. A carousel is a carousel regardless of what tech was used and how it was hacked together and I think that you should be proud regardless. I'm probably wrong though...
Good to see developers and the like still being practical as ever though 😂😂😂
As long as a questionable bit of code has decent tests I'd let it in the codebase.
'Cloud' hosting is inferior to a standard VPS for most users
Why? Got a blog or video to explain?
Also, what is VPS and how much does it cost?
For beginners dev, hosting shouldn't cost a penny.
VPS stands for virtual private server. It is basically just a computer with certain specs you have full controll over. This means you can host anything on it, a website, a game server, mine bitcoins, whatever. I have one for just €5 a month, though the specs are not that great.
When I say cloud, I am referring to the services offered by Google or Amazon. The main difference is the "pay-for-what-you-use" policy, instead of a fixed price per computer you pay for the amount of processing power you use. The dynamic scaling ususally needs to be done with some API which leads to vendor lock-in, plus if you use a bit more in a month it actually quickly gets more expensive than a VPS with similar specs.
I agree for beginners you shouldn't by either, better to use GitHub pages, Heroku, or PythonAnywhere. However, if you need non-trivial processing power or a custom domain or anything outside the limitations of those services, get a VPS.
Also, don't get shared hosting. It's barely cheaper but usually you are restricted to PHP and when you need anything that requires root you have to go via customer support. The only advantage is that you don't have to set up email yourself.
"Testing ist not neccesary"
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