Comment on The Great Software Quality Collapse: How We Normalized Catastrophe

chunes@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

• fluckx@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  This is very true. You don’t need a bigger database server, you need an index on that table you query all the time that’s doing full table scans.

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  • GenosseFlosse@feddit.org ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    You never worked onrold code. It’s never that simple in practice when you have to make changes to existing code without breaking or rewriting everything.

    Sometimes the client wants a new feature that cannot easily implement and has to do a lot of different DB lookups that you can not do in a single query. Sometimes your controller loops over 10000 DB records, and you call a function 3 levels down that suddenly must spawn a new DB query each time it’s called, but you cannot change the parent DB query.

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    • fluckx@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Where is this even coming from? The guy above me is saying not to give devs better hardware and to teach them to code better.

      I followed up with an example of how using indices in a database to boost the performance helped more than throwing more hardware at it.

      This has nothing to do with having worked on old code. Stop trying to pull my comment out of context.

      But yes you’re right. Adding indexes to a database does nothing to solve adding a new feature in the scenario you described. I also never claimed it did.

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    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      but you cannot change the parent DB query.

      Why not?

      This sounds like the “don’t touch working code” nonsense I hear from junior devs and contracted teams. They’re so worried about creating bugs that they don’t fix larger issues and more and more code gets enshrined as “untouchable.” IMO, the older and less understood logic is, the more it needs to be touched so we can expose the bugs.

      Here’s what should happen, depending on when you find it:

      • grooming/research phase - increase estimates enough to fix it
      • development phase - ask senior dev for priority; most likely, you work around for now, but schedule a fix once feature compete; if it’s significant enough, timelines may be adjusted
      • testing phase/hotfix - same as dev, but much more likely to put it off

      Teams should have a budget for tech debt, and seniors can adjust what tech debt they pick.

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      • lightnegative@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        “Don’t touch working code” stems from “last person who touched it, owns it” and there’s some shit that it’s just not worth your pay grade to own.

        Particularly if you’re a contractor employed to work on something specific

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      • ieGod@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        That budget is the key. You have to demonstrate/convince the purse holders first. This isn’t always an easy task.

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    • PattyMcB@lemmy.world ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      That’s why it needs to be written better in the first place

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      • GenosseFlosse@feddit.org ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Tell me you never worked on legacy code without telling me…

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  • PattyMcB@lemmy.world ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Or sharding on a particular column

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