What is a “good" developer?
I recently finished a project in which I had to perform some major league refactoring. The codebase was set up in GitLab and contained a Golang web server which provided a static user interface for controlling a Raspberry Pi.
After 5 minutes into the code, the wtf’s, fuck this-es, and mutha fuckers started to fly. I stepped back, grabbed a coffee and glass of wine for good measure; and, the question dawned on me: What is a good developer?
I remember being back in college in my first C++ class. We had to run to class undercover for fear that the tyrannosaurus rex might eat us… yeah, it was a while ago -- before Go, Rust, and Node.js was even a hitch in their developer’s pants. I was paired with this slovenly computer science student on a debugging exercise; the one where you put a bug into your code and have the other programmer try to find it. I had already been writing code used in industrial control panels 5 years prior to college (again, before even Java and JavaScript became the standards), so I understood the exquisite pain of debugging source code.
This guy, on the other hand, couldn’t make a coherent thought let alone a readable codebase. He was finished debugging my 100 lines of code in 5 minutes. It took me almost an hour to decipher the gibberish code in front of me.
Was it because this programmer was better and more experienced than me? Emphatically, NO!!!
My code was clean and organized. His was a cluster fucking headache.
This industry seems to pride itself in speed, performance, and testing for ignorant code challenges which have no more grasp on reality than the moron who is imposing the test. We want to flaunt our laissez-faire attitudes and holier than thou moralistic values. We are tolerant of any popular social economical tendency towards socialism and/or anarchy. We cheer democratization and boo/hiss conservatism. Diversity, tolerance, and coexist become the bullshit bumper stickers on the backs of our MacBooks (sorry, I’m more of a Linux Debian/Ubuntu guy myself — Bill Gates can go to hell!).
In essence, we’ve all lost our fucking minds!!! Entropy may be the way of the universe, depending upon whom to talk to; but, it shouldn’t be our way. Structure and Organization are our Saviors.
Again, let it sink in, “Structure and Organization are our Saviors!”
A good developer is one who recognizes this, embraces this. Lives this kind of life. Behaves in this fashion. We don’t need to be automatons, but we do need to have some semblance of structure and organization.
The best codebases I read are usually Google’s. These are straight-forward, easy to read, easy to understand. The variable names actually do what they say. The functions also are clearly named and defined. The flow is in an orderly, well-mannered fashion. The code behaves itself. It is not unruly, and unpredictable. It is simple, elegant, and solid.
We as an industry need to get our shit together if we’re going to survive the next generation of millions of new developers joining the ranks. We need to stop with all the unnecessary faux moralistic crap and get back to brass tacks.
