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1. Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Sunday, 10-Dec-2023 06:55:49 JST Aral Balkan

   A little unconventional #coding #tip:

   Always copy and paste code. At least at first. Don’t overthink it.

   And: Don’t start refactoring right away.

   Why?

   Because you might think you’re creating almost similar behavior but you don’t know that really until you actually customise what you pasted. Refractoring based on the assumption of redundancy instead of the fact of it is premature refactoring. Once you’ve specialised your pasted code, then look for redundancy and then refactor.

   #dev

   • Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Sunday, 10-Dec-2023 07:06:43 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     • aburka 🫣

     @aburka Indeed, hence the “then look for redundancy and then refactor” bit ;)

     This is more about not copying and pasting but refactoring from the assumption of the redundancy you expect instead of the reality of it.

   • aburka 🫣 (aburka@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 10-Dec-2023 07:06:44 JST aburka 🫣

     in reply to

     @aral Good advice... in moderation. The trap is that temporary solutions can extremely easily turn permanent, especially under a deadline. But I'm feeling this recently, I'm working on porting a work thing from a deprecated API to the new API, and I started by copying the whole thing. I'll hopefully be able to merge it back together at the end, but that depends on how different the new API ends up being. Giving yourself permission to copy/paste can definitely break down the barrier to starting.

   • Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Sunday, 10-Dec-2023 07:10:46 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     • Matthew Schulkind

     @mschulkind Interesting. I’m not sure I’d go that far but, like all things, context matters :)

   • Matthew Schulkind (mschulkind@sigmoid.social)'s status on Sunday, 10-Dec-2023 07:10:48 JST Matthew Schulkind

     in reply to

     @aral I've heard this stated just slightly differently. Don't refactor to a common place until the 2nd time you reuse something (3rd copy).

   • Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Sunday, 10-Dec-2023 07:12:02 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     • aburka 🫣

     @aburka Good luck :) And, yeah, real life has a way of getting in the way of theoretical purity.

   • aburka 🫣 (aburka@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 10-Dec-2023 07:12:03 JST aburka 🫣

     in reply to

     @aral Yeah, hopefully I have time to get to that bit on this project. Tight deadline is tight.

   • Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Sunday, 10-Dec-2023 07:20:07 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     • aburka 🫣

     @aburka (Don’t forget, we’re just glorified plumbers that work with data instead of water and sometimes a bit of tape on a leaky pipe is what an emergency calls for or all you can spare in the moment.) :)