Comment by heurisko | Hacker News Reader

Comment by heurisko | Hacker News Reader

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On the other hand, I worked for a company that seemed to follow Stack Overflow's article (sparse tests, unmockable static fields) that made everything a nightmare and slowed velocity almost to a halt, and provided a brittle customer experience.

I can quite believe that caching SQL results saved time (hardly not a "best practice"). The waters become murkier when you say you can't afford basic abstractions to make things testable.

They provide no statistics on how much time their "optimisations" actually saved. Likely, their optimisations wouldn't have made a difference, as they would have been JIT'd away anyway.

I am very much opinion that if you're writing code without some sort of test, you're writing legacy code.

While they do not provide any benchmarks in the summarizing article, I can guarantee that they have done some (read: alot) profiling. I follow both Nick Craver and Marc Gravell on Twitter, and they regularly post benchmarks for optimizations done at SO, in the .net world they are some of the most knowledgable people on performance optimizations.

> (sparse tests, unmockable static fields) that made everything a nightmare

I had the same thought. I've noticed over the past few decades that most developers migrate toward static fields (i.e. making everything global) not for performance reasons, but just because it's requires less up-front thought. And when the only thing that shows up on your year-end performance review is "did you hit the date?" this is almost understandable. Maybe the folks at SO really are that good - they can code everything right the first time and there's no particular need for unit tests, but I'm used to finding bugs that have been in the code for YEARS that would have been trivially caught if the code had just been run even one time under observation. I'm also used to code that's so monolithic (statics that import other statics that import other statics) that it takes months for new hires to get any sort of proficiency in - and that's if they're really experienced to begin with.

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