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I worked with a developer for months. He was senior to me; on more money than me and had way more experience. I spent at least 25% of my time explaining the most basic stuff to him. Things like 'no, that's not how a cache works', 'no, you shouldnt be doing string concatenation inside a loop', 'no you've completely written the wrong thing because you didn't listen'

When he left, he claimed to have finished off a feature for our application. We dove into it, rewrote it, made it more efficient, the code cleaner, the documentation more succinct and the logic more obvious. When I say we, I mean me and a student, and by me and a student, I mean the student with some very light prodding from me.

Comments
  • 3
    this is embrassing but what is the right way to write string concatenation. can you enlighten me. thanks! 🙏
  • 4
    @ralee common Java practise is to use a string builder. It is essentially a way to mutate bytes. String concatenation will create a new string every time.

    Even though the Java compiler automatically turns concats in loops into a string builder so it ends up compiling down the same, but just because the compiler handles it doesn't make it okay :)
  • 0
    As he did not listen says a lot. I think you are better off that he moved on.
  • 0
    Be interested to see what the down vote was for? Turning into SO now!?

    And yeah, it's sad to say but he just didn't have the horsepower to write good code.
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