[-] danrot@kbin.social 1 points 8 months ago

I agree that some stuff is easier when not squashing commits, but for the teams I've been working with I've felt that the pros of squashing outweigh the cons, but of course YMMV.

But I didn't know about git bisect skip, thanks for the tip! But sincere question: What happens if there are e.g. three adjacent broken commits? If I have skip all three of those and the error was introduced in one of them, then git cannot tell me which commit introduced the error, right?

[-] danrot@kbin.social 1 points 8 months ago

I swear, I didn't come up with that myself, I read that somewhere else, but of course I don't have a source anymore 🙈 Maybe some git developer is a huge fan of wordplays?

2
submitted 8 months ago by danrot@kbin.social to c/programming@kbin.social

The value of a clean git history is often underestimated. I will explain one of the advantages based on the git bisect command.

1
submitted 8 months ago by danrot@kbin.social to c/programming@kbin.social

Mocking libraries come with disadvantages, but fortunately they can be replaced by in-memory implementations, at least for repositories.

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submitted 10 months ago by danrot@kbin.social to c/programming@kbin.social

GitHub uses MySQL to store vast amounts of relational data. This is the story of how we seamlessly upgraded our production fleet to MySQL 8.0.

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submitted 10 months ago by danrot@kbin.social to c/linux@kbin.social

The shell history is cluttered with useless commands if stuff like tokens are included. Shell variables allow to exclude such content from the history.

[-] danrot@kbin.social 1 points 10 months ago

I think this is one of the most common misconceptions about DRY. Just because you have two times the same line in your code base it is not automatically a violation of DRY. If you compare if a number is bigger than 18 it is definitely not a good idea to extract that part if you are comparing the hour of the day once and the age the other time. In that case it would even be bad to create an abstration, and it would not be a violation of DRY. And I agree that something like this leads to code that is hard to maintain.

[-] danrot@kbin.social 1 points 10 months ago

I have also seen well commented code, but in this article I concentrate on the bad ones. Are you saying you have never seen a bad code comment?

[-] danrot@kbin.social 1 points 10 months ago

I think this is also in line with my article, since not being able to put yourself into somebody else's shoes (or even in yourself future's ones) is the reason for so much bad comments. But adding a comment to every single line cannot be the solution either, at least not in a higher programming language.

[-] danrot@kbin.social 1 points 10 months ago

I agree with almost all of what you say, but the thing IME is that in most cases people learn to comment a lot, which results in comments that feel like they've been done just for the sake of it, which is one of the main problems IMO. It's not like "just add a comment, it won't hurt", since comments can be immensely misleading and literally take a lot of time until figuring out that the comment was wrong if you trust the wrong ones.

I also agree that this tends to be worse with bad code, which also is not surprising. Sometimes it feels to me like people think they can fix bad code with some comments, and I think that is far from being true.

I also admit that especially the title of the article might be a bit provocative, but giving the general positive sentiment of comments I think this is called for. Sometimes you have to exaggerate a bit to get some attention. I don't like click-baiting either, but unfortunately it works ;-)

[-] danrot@kbin.social 1 points 10 months ago

I give you that, but I am not talking about assembly languages, therefore the examples from my blogpost aren't showing any :-)

[-] danrot@kbin.social 1 points 10 months ago

Totally agree, that's why I also mentioned this in the article.

Very often good code that is self-explanatory does not need any comments at all and if it does, the comment should describe why it has been implemented this way instead of just repeating what the code already says.

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submitted 11 months ago by danrot@kbin.social to c/programming@kbin.social

Comments in code are quite often a code smell. Let’s see what is suboptimal about comments and talk about some strategies to avoid them.

[-] danrot@kbin.social 1 points 11 months ago

Ah, you are talking about systemd, wasn't aware of that... I imagine that to be much more complicated for many use cases. E.g. running a unit test (as I describe in the article) isn't something I would use systemd for. Setting up a path and a service seems more complicated than using entr, and it is probably also harder to get to the output as well.

[-] danrot@kbin.social 1 points 11 months ago

I am not exactly sure what you mean by that... But the main advantage is that the command does not have to be executed manually everytime you change something. Instead entr recognizes when something changes and re-executes the command for you.

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submitted 11 months ago by danrot@kbin.social to c/linux@kbin.social

Sometimes you want a command to be automatically executed as soon as a certain file changes. There is a small tool called entr, which helps with that.

danrot

joined 1 year ago