Readit News logoReadit News
DixieDev commented on Code review can be better   tigerbeetle.com/blog/2025... · Posted by u/sealeck
3036e4 · 4 months ago
What bothered me for a long time with code reviews is that almost all useful things they catch (i.e. not nit-picking about subjective minor things that doesn't really matter) are much too late in the process. Not rarely the only (if any) useful outcome of a review is that everything has to be done from scratch in a different ways (completely new design) or that it is abandoned since it turns out it should never have been done at all.

It always seems as if the code review is the only time when all stakeholders really gets involved and starts thinking about a change. There may be some discussion earlier on in a jira ticket or meeting, and with some luck someone even wrote a design spec, but there will still often be someone from a different team or distant part of the organization that only hears about the change when they see the code review. This includes me. I often only notice that some other team implemented something stupid because I suddenly get a notification that someone posted a code review for some part of the code that I watch for changes.

Not that I know how to fix that. You can't have everyone in the entire company spend time looking at every possible thing that might be developed in the near future. Or can you? I don't know. That doesn't seem to ever happen anyway. At university in the 1990's in a course about development processes there wasn't only code reviews but also design reviews, and that isn't something I ever encountered in the wild (in any formal sense) but I don't know if even a design review process would be able to catch all the things you would want to catch BEFORE starting to implement something.

DixieDev · 4 months ago
Where I work we tend to write RFCs for fundamental design decisions. Deciding what counts as a "fundamental design decision" is sometimes self-moderated in the moment but we also account for it when making long term plans. For example when initially creating epics in Jira we might find it hard to flesh out as we don't really know how we're going to approach it, so we just start it off with a task to write an RFC.

These can be written either for just our team or for the eyes of all other software teams. In the latter case we put these forward as RFCs for discussion in a fortnightly meeting, which is announced well in advance so people can read them, leave comments beforehand, and only need to attend the meeting if there's an RFC of interest to them up for discussion.

This has gone pretty well for us! It can feel like a pain to write some of these, and at times I think we overuse them somewhat, but I much prefer our approach to any other place I've worked where we didn't have any sort of collaborative design process in place at all.

DixieDev commented on We need visual programming. No, not like that   blog.sbensu.com/posts/dem... · Posted by u/stopachka
tsimionescu · a year ago
Type systems in languages like Haskell or Rust are very very very far from being able to "guarantee correctness". They can only realistically be used to specify extremely basic properties of your program ("doesn't have side effects", "doesn't write memory concurrently", this sort of thing).

For any more interesting properties (say "this function returns a sorted version of the input list", or "this function finds the smallest element in the set", or "this transaction is atomic"), you need something like dependent types, and that comes with a hell of a lot more work.

DixieDev · a year ago
I would like to see improvements in the speed of feedback - particularly from language servers - but the value of those 'basic' guarantees is more than worth the current cost. Unexpected side effects are responsible for almost every trip I've taken with a debugger in any large Java or C++ project I've ever worked on.
DixieDev commented on Scrum's Built-In 'Get Out of Jail Free Card' Against Criticism   mdalmijn.com/p/scrums-bui... · Posted by u/thunderbong
Freak_NL · 2 years ago
I'm sure this happens because my senses haven't been dulled down enough to just shrug and gloss over these, but the AI-generated filler image after the first full paragraph just jars me out of the reading groove and makes me just drop the article. It feels derisive.

How is this better than just grabbing a photo of an actual get out of jail free-card from somewhere?

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Get_Out_of_Jail_Free...

(CC-BY)

DixieDev · 2 years ago
Your comment is far too reasonable. Go directly to jail. Do not pass ⅄OR.
DixieDev commented on Nushell 0.86   nushell.sh/blog/2023-10-1... · Posted by u/kytazo
DixieDev · 2 years ago
Nushell is quite nice. Tables are nice to work with and look at, and the cross-platform support is top notch. It feels like what Powershell would have been, had it been designed by people who have actually used a command-line before. The main issues I have are bugs. Most recently, I find that it can't properly handle files with square brackets in the name, which isn't really all that uncommon.

I wouldn't recommend it for day-to-day, production usage just yet, but definitely worth keeping an eye on if you're not a huge fan of the typical stringly-typed shells.

DixieDev commented on Anything longer ago than yesterday should just say the actual date   grumpy.website/1389... · Posted by u/microflash
jstanley · 2 years ago
The problem is that on Monday morning "posted last week" could mean it was posted less than 12 hours ago, or almost an entire week ago.
DixieDev · 2 years ago
Where have you seen a service describing something posted less than 12 hours ago as being "posted last week" rather than "posted yesterday"/"posted today"?
DixieDev commented on Why Kakoune   andreyor.st/posts/2023-09... · Posted by u/rc00
DixieDev · 2 years ago
I got quite annoyed with Neovim config at some point and tried out Kakoune, and ended up contributing some window splitting code to the main repo for Sway. I liked it quite a lot, but it's not built with Windows in mind so I ended up crawling back to Neovim. I'd be interested to hear of any Kakoune-like editors with better cross-platform support/design.
DixieDev commented on Egregoria: 3D City Builder without a grid   github.com/Uriopass/Egreg... · Posted by u/dosshell
mnky9800n · 2 years ago
> Spectra is a cross-platform, open-source community where physical placemakers and virtual worldbuilders come together to create sustainable, human-centered, and technologically progressive urbanization.

How can it be any less obvious what Spectra is. Haha.

DixieDev · 2 years ago
I feel genuinely insane trying to parse this site. It's a miracle that there's no mention of Web3.
DixieDev commented on Mistakes with Rust smart pointers: when Deref goes wrong   fuzzypixelz.com/blog/dere... · Posted by u/xy2_
OskarS · 2 years ago
I've always liked that feature of C and C++. There's a lot of people that really hate it and in new languages they unify it to be just a dot. Zig does this as well, for instance. I always liked that the distinction was very explicit: use a.b() if you're calling b() on the object itself, use a->b() if you're de-referencing a first.

There are lots of things wrong with C and C++ that Zig and Rust fixes, but I never thought of this one being problematic in any way. It's as easy to type, the difference is obvious, and it's easy to see from a glance what's going on.

DixieDev · 2 years ago
I'm mostly indifferent to it because it doesn't really harm readability, and it's not hard to know when to use it, but I can seem why it might be more strongly disliked. You can't entirely rely on it to know a dereference is happening because references (e.g. `int&`) aren't subject to the `->` requirement. It's also annoying if you find that you can refactor `func(T*)` to `func(T&)` and now you have to replace all `->`s with `.`s.
DixieDev commented on It Took Me a Decade to Find the Perfect Personal Website Stack – Ghost+Fathom   davidgomes.com/it-took-me... · Posted by u/davidgomes
DixieDev · 2 years ago
Is writing a simple CSS file and some HTML code really too much effort for a personal blog? Clicking around this site the only non-trivial things are the RSS feed and the paginated scrolling (which seems wholly unnecessary) on the homepage.
DixieDev commented on Rust, RR, Neovim: A perfect debug combination   github.com/vlopes11/rrust... · Posted by u/zteppenwolf
DixieDev · 3 years ago
Anyone got other useful tools for debugging within (neo)vim? Just seamlessly putting down breakpoints, stepping through code execution, and getting a fully fledged debugging UI experience (a la Visual Studio or Remedy BG)? This is possibly the only thing I miss from developing on Windows, and it's a shame!

EDIT: I specified 'within vim' but actually I'd be down for standalone Linux app recommendations too.

u/DixieDev

KarmaCake day251September 25, 2020View Original