Are you proud over your code? | Hacker News Reader

Are you proud over your code?

1 pointgroundthrower4 comments

I have a SaaS which is going relatively well, having many enterprises as customers. Quite a few of them say my shit is better than all competitive solutions.

However, when I look at my code I feel like it's a house of cards. It all looks and works good from the outside(sort of), but when I look at both the frontend and backend it looks like a mess.

I have zero tests and push to production without any validation whatsoever.

I don't know if it's the whole thing with building a spa with a rest api which feels like it is not supposed to be like it should, using serializers and stuff everywhere to validate data multiple times and could still break with the change of a parameter.

I think I am quite a good coder, but as soon as a codebase grows, it gets bad.

What is your reflection on your code?

I am very proud of some of the code I have written, some of it I am less proud of. Today I am working on a project that other people started and that I've contribute a lot to. In the course of the same day I will work in some areas that I think we're doing much better than most of the industry but also find some things that are worse.

Whether or not these feelings are "correct" I do know they change over time.

A long time ago I wrote about 1500 lines of PHP that looked like FORTRAN, not just any FORTRAN, but the kind of FORTRAN people wrote when FORTRAN first got "HOLLERITH" Strings and a few fanatics wrote FORTRAN compilers in FORTRAN.

I revised that code about once a year for the next five years and always went through a cycle of: "that's insane", "oh yeah, i did think this through the first time" to "wow!"

You are falling into the developer trap of thinking the quality of your code matters. Customers don't care as long as it's reasonable stable, works and solves their problem.

Imposter Syndrome?

Most of us are actually better than we think we are. OTOH, some of our work really is bad.

Overall, most of us are as bad and as good as the next person. But we tend to focus on how bad our shortcomings are and play down our successes. Just Human nature.

There's an old proverb that's helpful in these cases "If it works, don't fix it."

It sounds to me like you have built a very successful proof of concept. Revel in your success and hopefully it will afford you the opportunity to harden your offering over time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com