Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by alain_gilbert | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

alain_gilbert

I used to be an "insane weirdo", but at some point I gave up.

Now, I just focus on code correctness, merge and fix the code style myself, avoiding a lot of useless back and forth.

My hope is that people like to see their name when they "git blame" (what's the PC version of "blame" again?)

So they will over time learn to follow the code style in order to keep their name there.

View on HN

If you can, commit wholely to a parsing formatter and plug it into your CI pipeline. I've come to realise over the years that its not style I care about per-se, but consistency. With a parsing formatter and an opinionated linter, you're pretty much covered automatically across all development and developers.

Yep -- where I work, every language we use in any big way has a high-quality automated formatter, and we require all code to be formatted with these tools. It's been a dramatic improvement in code readability in general across the company. We have a few engineers who would consistently beat the formatter by a very small margin if they were formatting their code by hand, but they are the exception -- 95% of the code submitted across the company is improved by these tools.

> My hope is that people like to see their name when they "git blame"

Sadly, my impression is that a lot of people don't want to see their own names on git blame, because they fundamentally operate on "you break it, you buy it" mode. As long as their name isn't associated with a particular piece of code, it's not their fault that it's broken. (It doesn't matter that the code is fundamentally broken and has been broken since inception five years ago - not my fault!) Here, let me just add a quick wrapper layer on top of it so that my module can work around the bug, while at the same time making my module depend on the broken behavior...

I see two different scenarios for this:

Open source: in open source, I hope people want their contributions to be visible, so that they can brag about it, or put it in their resume.

Business: in business, maybe some people wants to hide some contributions they made in order to avoid being blamed for broken code.

But at the same time, if you have code stats and you see that an engineer owns less than x% of the codebase, it could be seen as a bad sign.

> what's the PC version of "blame" again?

JetBrains uses "annotate"

Credit

I like that a lot.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com