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Omer Rosenbaum
Omer Rosenbaum

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What's one piece of advice every dev should ignore? 🚩🚩🚩

We'll go first >

"Good code is self-documenting"

What would you add?

Top comments (29)

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diethrone profile image
Sagar Barapatre

I according to me this is the advice I often hear that I definitely ignore:

If your change is small enough there's no need to test.

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

"Smallness" is definitely not the proper litmus test.

And if you don't want that small change to break later, a regression test couldn't possibly hurt, right?

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diethrone profile image
Sagar Barapatre

Yeah, absolutely!!

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unofficialdxnny profile image
Danial Ahmed

Yes same lol! for example if I'm making scripts in python and I change to add a print statement with colour I always run the program to make sure it works as I want it to.

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sherrydays profile image
Sherry Day

"X is dead. You should probably find a hot new thing to learn."

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Any super duper opinionated advice on which software to choose for a problem.

A good suggestion is always useful — but when it's approached with an outside amount of conviction, one should take that with a grain of salt. The advice often lacks context.

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curiousdev profile image
CuriousDev

The "good code" can definitely be self-documenting to some extent. There can be exceptions of course.

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jamesthomson profile image
James Thomson

Seriously. I find most projects built with TS are pretty much self documenting. There are obviously more factors, but a well typed project will get you 90% of the way.

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dinerdas profile image
Diner Das

Any advice about documentation that does not include ongoing structure and discipline.

Maintaining good docs is inherently pretty difficult, and there is no magical solution. Good documentation is a matter of a number of combinatory factors that can lead to success, there is no silver bullet.

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Dogma which is complemented by dogmatic backlashes to the original dogma: A software story.

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alaindet profile image
Alain D'Ettorre

"Learn X, it's faster and better than Y"

The missing part is that X is something of a hyped POC, with virtually no real project using it, with less DX than Y, while Y is battle-tested and there's no real reason to change it expect for hype and some weird scenarios.

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pauldubois777 profile image
Paul DuBois • Edited

Advice to ignore:

Don't ever ignore any advice, as you can always learn something from any advice you get, and also show respect to those who offer it, but consider the source.

Wrap your head around that one!

;)

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techman09 profile image
TechMan09

Wrap your head around that one!, I cannot!

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leob profile image
leob

No - "Good code is self-documenting" is a basic truth, up to a point ... it's a useful guideline, if not taken too far (sometimes you do need to write comments).

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techman09 profile image
TechMan09

Why don’t you code code it yourself instead of complaining about that library or whatever-the-heck you called it?

Uh, because complaining is fun, and it will take me an extra 100 years to code it myself…

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tamusjroyce profile image
tamusjroyce

Sorry for the two-parter:

do you know functional programming? Like closures and currying?

Note: all code that is reachable is functional. I mean, pure lambda functions or any set-based/tuple-calculus-based patterns are great. But they aren’t anymore “functional” than anything else.

Closures & currying is deprecated in favor of es6 classes. And they really amount to a complex way to do inheritance on the fly. 🤢🤮

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christiankozalla profile image
Christian Kozalla

Advice to ignore: "You should not use Dev.to like you use Twitter" ^^

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mxdpeep profile image
Filip Oščádal

1) don't learn PHP
2) don't do drugs :)
3) don't read manuals

 
ben profile image
Ben Halpern

frustrating

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jasoncubic profile image
JasonCubic

If it works then don't touch it.