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I often want to scream at co-workers because of their lack of attention to details.

I believe attention to detail is important for software engineers.

I tell my junior developers that "it works" isn't enough, you need to make sure it works as perfectly as possible and paying attention to detail helps with that.

Comments
  • 4
    @irene sometimes its good enough to make it work and pay the technical debt later. We have ios consultant in my startup who is reviewing my code (and Im doing android). So his reviews are useless to me, just nit picking about missing spaces, new lines, unclear function naming and thats pretty much it. He doesnt even test my features/bugfixes nor he understands whether I follow architecture or no. Hes fcking useless to me.
  • 0
    @irene I agree that perfectionism is bad. But this isn't about being perfect. It's about getting close to it as possible.

    Thanks for the # correction. 😊 I haven't ranted in while.
  • 0
    @zemaitis I believe any technical debt that can be avoided now, should be avoided. Although we both know that's rarely the case as time constraint is always a thing in software engineering but that shouldn't stop you from trying.

    My two pence.
  • 1
    @irene 👍 Aptly surmised. My rant is focused on those who don't even bother to try to be better.

    Diminishing returns is a problem that occurs when you at least get the maximum possible return.

    People sometimes don't even try.
  • 2
    I extend that also to documentation and hate it when there are lots of typos, grammar mistakes, inconsistent use of styles and shit.

    Oh, and variable names with fucking typos, that really ticks me off.
  • 0
    @fdamilola

    I agree with you on *attention to details*, but not the example you stated.

    As @irene said, you will get into that rabbit hole out of which you will never come out alive.

    Rather than it works, I prefer what works and what doesn't work. My 2 cents :)
  • 0
    @gowtham-sai Fair enough. 😊
  • 0
    I often struggle with the same problems, but then I again I don't have a lot of projects together with coworkers.

    I tend to be a perfectionist but since I started working as a software dev, I had to lower perfectionism a bit due to financial aspects. Nevertheless it's very important to focus on the details in code as well in order to effectively prevent bugs.
  • 0
    Everyone has a different opinion of perfection. Some focus too much on abstraction and create a massive convoluted codebase. Others focus too much on formatting and naming conventions and waste time. Others focus on micro performance optimizations and spend too much time on every little thing. To me, perfection in coding isn’t perfect...it’s balance. It means limiting liability by keeping things simple and short. Only abstract as necessary. Use quality naming conventions that are easy to identify vs ones that are super short or fun and goofy. Knowing when to focus on performance vs maintainability.
  • 1
    @Stebner55 💯💯
    Balance is everything.
  • 1
    In Agile development good is good enough... If it isn't, there's an optimization user story that needs to be created and worked. But only when a problem arises - not the perceived possibility of the problem
  • 0
    @irene disagree. You may think it's easier to do it now but it may have never been needed. Not ever doing it is the most efficient.
  • 0
    In software the cost of not doing these little clean ups and refactors is really huge @martygeek
    I don't see any developer ever saying that probably we shouldn't do that clean up or refactoring. If you ever see that coming from anybody, either they didn't do well thought refactoring or that's not actually a refactoring but mor hacks.

    What @irene is saying actually true. Lemme put this way.., software/code churns out so fast. So there is always this thing called move slow to move fast in long term.

    If you follow people like martin flower and etc.. There are some ground rules, like red, green, refactor. CI/CD, every commit to master, little commit frequency and etc. If you follow them, you will see fruitful results in near future.
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