There’s a lot of fear at my job about changing code. I’ve been trying to tell them to start writing automated tests. Or at least a linter to check for syntax errors. They’re all like “ooh that sounds hard maybe next quarter”
Meanwhile, a trivial change requires a whole day because the developer has to manually test everything.
I just unilaterally added checks to code I have ownership over, but anything shared I’m getting “maybe in two quarters we can prioritize this” from management.
At my job:
We do have a linter and tons of automatic tests. Changes are generally quite safe, not a lot of manual tests are necessary.
Meanwhile, a trivial change requires a whole day because the developer has to adjust dozens of tests and get them through a pipeline that takes hours to run.
Oof. I’ve had places that the pipeline was getting long. At one of my previous jobs I made it so all the tests could run locally, and we were keeping the full build as slow as possible.
We also didn’t do any browser tests (eg: selenium) because those tend to be slow and most people are bad at making them stable.
It’s important to know whats worth testing.
I haven’t been in the field for too long but my very first job had extensive ci/cd pipelines setup. At first I was kind of annoyed by having to write tests and having my code auto refused by lint checks. Now that I experienced a job that didn’t have any automated testing, I realized how much I love TDD. Nearly all my personal projects have ci with at the very least lint checks.
Start interviewing
That’s the plan. Unfortunately the market is kind of meh. Lots of AI slop. Lots of getting ghosted.
“Trying to move an image one pixel down in Word”
“It’s just one
goto, what’s the worst that could happen?”Raptors
Reminds me of the time my whole website started spinning because I forgot to close a tag.
Damnit Escher. Not in my code too.
Reminds me of this: 2022 - Non-Euclidean Doom: what happens to a game when pi is not 3.14159…
I commented out a line in the game I’m building and the enemy could suddenly control my character. Cool cool cool cool cool
If AIs were able to handle this safely, I’d consider using them.
This totally happens in code where functions have plenty of side effects. And thats why functional programming can lead to fearless refactoring!
