Working in Development: Leaving sounds like a great decision.

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Working in Development: Leaving sounds like a great decision.

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Ephphatha posted:

Guess this is the most appropriate place to ask, there was some talk in one of the other threads about some articles detailing why over-using globals in code is an anti-pattern but I've never managed to find anything more comprehensive than a vague blog post. Anyone have any material they'd recommend? I don't expect anything to change at my workplace but it might make me feel better to know I'm not the only person who wants to actually use appropriate scoping to the extent the lovely languages I have to code in support it.

With global variables it becomes harder to see how classes and methods relate to each other. For example, usually you can look at a class's instance fields and know that, to do something in any given method, it'll use some of these fields + whatever arguments are specific to that method. But when you use global variables, all that goes out the window, because it could potentially be using data from any random place in your entire application. Makes it harder to follow the 'flow' of code, instead of strictly defined inputs your methods could be grabbing input all over the place.

# ¿ Nov 26, 2015 04:10

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 12:35

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Officially matched with an intern today! :toot:

I feel all growed up!

Cicero fucked around with this message at 02:32 on Dec 12, 2015

# ¿ Dec 12, 2015 02:27

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

In my opinion software development is virtually impossible to estimate accurately, because in order to accurately estimate how long it takes to build something you need to have done it before, and if you've built something before in software why aren't you just re-using that code? Hence everything you build tends to be novel, at least to you, otherwise you wouldn't be building it. Not only that, this is probably MORE true the better your other development practices are, because you'll tend to develop in a more generic way that's more amenable to re-use.

# ¿ Mar 9, 2016 18:46

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Skandranon posted:

A story of 1 point is supposed to be the simplest user story possible. So something like "update colours" or "make button print text", but in terms of your project. It should also be more a measure of relative complexity, not pure time.

How do you measure how complex a programming task is if not in how much time it will take?

# ¿ Apr 18, 2016 19:35

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

quote:

it sounds like it is half as complicated as activity Y.

But why does it sound half as complicated? Because to me, when I think something sounds half as complicated, that's because it feels like it'll take half as long. I guess to me "complexity of a task" and "how long it will take" are effectively the same thing.

# ¿ Apr 18, 2016 20:00

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Skandranon posted:

It is a fuzzy thing, but that's sort of the point. We are poo poo at estimating. The idea of story points is instead of trying really hard to stick to a hard metric and failing, you make fuzzier estimates and then you get a rough projection over multiple sprints how many fuzzy points you can accomplish.

Yeah but what does a story point mean? It's obviously a metric, what does it measure?

Skandranon posted:

I think of it in terms of the character of a task, like for like. So adding buttons to a page is roughly equivalent, even if one requires 3x the markup. It should be more a measure of unknowns, not a measure of how much typing is needed or time that must be invested.

Task "character"? What does that even mean?

# ¿ Apr 18, 2016 20:13

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Today we went to Santa Cruz to have a team offsite on a catamaran.

# ¿ Jun 23, 2016 00:59

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 12:35

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Kallikrates posted:

Was it required?

No.

quote:

How many people got sea sick?

Nobody. Felt fairly stable overall. Some people took dramamine or something like that though before we got on.

# ¿ Jun 23, 2016 06:35

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Working in Development: Leaving sounds like a great decision.