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BiteCode_dev

It's true that being that much faster is interesting, but that's not the only reason.

ruff is just really good.

It has sane defaults, it is easy to use and configure. It can replace not one but multiple tools.

From day one it had few bugs or integration problems.

Charlie Marsh is just a damn good developer, on top of driving a good product vision.

That's rare.

Lots of respect to that.

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That's a very good point. We love to talk about speed in dev tools, probably because it's an easy metric to track, but usability and good features are really the key points for making a tool that people want to use and keep using. Too many open source projects neglect the product angle in favor of the technical.

> Charlie Marsh is just a damn good developer

curious how you assessed this. did you inspect the code or are you just commenting from the user POV?

Eating at a restaurant:

- "This chef is a great cook!"

- "How do you know, have you looked inside the kitchen?"

Code is not food. You can create a great product with shit code (Or just mediocre code!). Does that make someone a good dev, or a bad dev?

How you come to the conclusion he's "just a damn good developer" is a very fair question.

I think it's actually basically the same. Being a clean, organized cook is probably positively correlated with making good food, but it's not strictly necessary. If someone is writing sloppy code but shipping a project of this overall quality without leaking the "low quality" of their implementation, then I wouldn't presume to call them a "bad dev" - I would probably conclude that they're more efficient than I am at prioritizing where to spend organizational energy.

In this analogy, the food is the entire project, and a dev does much more than coding. You can do one thing right with luck, you can't do most things right by luck alone.

The guy is fluent in 2 languages, one being known to be hard to master, create a tool that replace several others, get adopted in months by half the community, welcome 172 contributors on a project that is parsing stuff, a hard problem. Also the doc is good.

As a professional dev, I never get all those right. Never.

So yes, the food is good, and the chef is excellent to get all that stuff right.

Is the function of the developer to write outstanding code, or develop outstanding products?

I think there's something to be said for praising the developer that is able to understand user needs so well that they create flawless experiences.

>Is the function of the developer to write outstanding code, or develop outstanding products?

Just my opinion of course, but to be considered a "damn good developer," you have to do both.

> You can create a great product with shit code (Or just mediocre code!). Does that make someone a good dev

Yes.

Oddly defensive. Why not answer the question?

Because he disagreed with the implication of the question and thought it was more important to address that?

The rest of the post you're replying to is a list of evidence, that claim was summarizing everything else.

FWIW, some of my time at Khan Academy overlapped with some of Charlie's and I agree with this assessment :)

I think everyone that's worked with him, would agree :)

For the brief time he was at Cedar, he contributed a lot of high quality code

When I worked at Khan Academy, Charlie was an intern, and for a few months we worked together on building the KA app for Android. I can vouch that he was a damn good developer then, and I'm sure he's a much better one now.

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