• magic_lobster_party@kbin.run
    123·
    3 months ago

    Had a coworker who was a bit like this. They were tasked to do one simple thing. Required a few lines of code change at most.

    They end up refactoring the entire damn thing and introduced new bugs in the process.

        • Jesus_666@feddit.de
          22·
          3 months ago

          Or, if the team does allow refactoring as part of an unrelated PR, have clean commits that allow me to review what you did in logical steps.

          If that’s not how you worked on the change than you either rewrite the history to make it look like you did or you’ll have to start over.

          • onlinepersona@programming.devEnglish
            52·
            3 months ago

            Not with that attitude they won’t 😛

            Refactoring in PRs just makes it more difficult to review. “Do these lines belong to the goal nor not?”. Also, we’re human and miss things. Adding more text to review means the chance of missing something increases.
            Especially if the refactored code isn’t just refactored but modified, things are very easy to miss. Move an entire block of code from one file to another and make changes within = asking for trouble or a “LGTM” without any actual consideration. It makes code reviews more difficult, error-prone, and annoying.

            Code reviews aren’t there to just tick off a box. They are there to ensure what’s on the tin is actually in it and whether it was done well.

            CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

            • nick@campfyre.nickwebster.dev
              2·
              3 months ago

              In my experience I haven’t had an issue because usually the refactorings are small. If they’re not I just hop on a call with the person who wrote the MR and ask them to walk me through it.

              In theory I’d like to have time to dedicate solely to code health, but that’s not quite the situation in basically any team I’ve been in.

              • onlinepersona@programming.devEnglish
                11·
                3 months ago

                I haven’t had any trouble separating refactors PRs from ticket PRs. Make the ticket PR, make a refactor PR on that ticket PR, merge the ticket PR, rebase refactor PR on master, open ticket PR for review, done 🤷

                CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

      • magic_lobster_party@kbin.run
        6·
        3 months ago

        A tiny bit of value, but definitely not worth the pain and effort. It wasn’t exactly any technical debt that hindered our development.

        We had other places with way more pressing technical debt that could’ve been focused on instead.

      • GBU_28@lemm.eeEnglish
        4·
        3 months ago

        I hear you, but they should MVP the ticket, close it, then concisely collar the PM/lead and say “I know how to make this better and am hungry to do it. Let me address some tech debt next sprint. I got this and will keep it timeboxxed. I’ll also ensure my changes pass QA before coming to you”

    • kamen@lemmy.world
      241·
      3 months ago

      The pipeline should handle formatting. No matter how you screw it up, once you commit, it gets formatted to an agreed upon standard.

        • FizzyOrange@programming.dev
          5·
          3 months ago

          Yeah I think that’s what he meant. You don’t want CI editing commits.

          I use pre-commit for this. It’s pretty decent. The major flaws I’ve found with it:

          • Each linter has to be in its own repo (for most linter types). So it’s not really usable for project-specific lints.

          • Doesn’t really work with e.g. pyright or pylint unless you use no third party dependencies because you need a venv set up with your dependencies installed and pre-commit (fairly reasonably) doesn’t take care of that.

          Overall it’s good, with some flaws, but there’s nothing better available so you should definitely use it.

      • sunbytes@lemmy.world
        2·
        3 months ago

        Some diff tools don’t handle indentation by default.

        So if you add a wrapper, it counts everything inside it as “changed”

        • kamen@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          3 months ago

          Pre-commit hooks is a common approach to this, so that whatever is committed gets processed. Another possibility would be to set a bot on the repo to do automated commits after human-made ones, but that can get a little noisy.

  • jjjalljs@ttrpg.network
    55·
    3 months ago

    There was a guy I worked with that tended to want to unilaterally make sweeping changes.

    Like, “we need the user to be able to enter their location” -> “cool. Done. I also switched the dependency manager from pip to poetry”.

    Only a little bit of exaggeration

    • remotelove@lemmy.ca
      251·
      3 months ago

      Some people, like me, are not built to be developers. I can sculpt code in any language I need for whatever problem I need to solve, but maintaining code over a long period of time, with others, is not my thing.

      The drive to do additional changes is just too high and the tendency for typos or obvious logic errors is too common. (There is one little improvement. It’s right there. One line up. Just change it now while you are in there…)

      I am not stupid and regard myself as a decent engineer but my brain is just wired in a more chaotic way. For some things that is ok. For developing code on a team, not so much.

      Security is the field I am most comfortable with because it allows for creative chaos. Rule breaking is encouraged. “Scripting” is much more applicable and temporary.

      • Faresh@lemmy.mlEnglish
        7·
        3 months ago

        When using git and are working on a feature, and suddenly want to work on something else, you can use git stash so git remembers your changes and is able to restore them when you are done. There is also git add -p this allows you to stage only certain lines of a file, this allows you to keep commits to a single feature if you already did another change that you didn’t commit (this is kind of error prone, since you have to make sure that the commit includes exactly the things that you want it to include, so this solution should be avoided). But the easiest way is when you get the feeling that you have completed a certain task towards your goal and that you can move on to another task, to commit. But if you fail you can also change the history in git, so if you haven’t pushed yet, you can move the commits around or, if you really need to, edit past commits and break them into multiple.

        • remotelove@lemmy.ca
          4·
          3 months ago

          I do. Also, I am olid(ish) so I have had many years to come to terms with what I can do well and where I struggle.

          In this case, I didn’t want to use it as a crutch or an excuse. After reading the number of awesome replies this morning, I realized I should have probably framed my comment differently.

          People here put some real time and effort into giving some solid advice and I didn’t expect that.

          Edit: As a pure example, this is the third or fourth edit of this comment. Words are challenging, and programming is very similar in that regard.

          • UckyBon@lemmy.world
            0·
            3 months ago

            Thank you so much for your reply. Your comment was so recognizable to me, and I’m in the process of being diagnosed with ADHD.

            Edit: I want to say that I do feel sorry for asking such a personal thing about you. I’m not young either, but just now coming to terms with it and figuring out that this is the reason why everything I do goes as it does. To recognize it in the wild is absolutely weird.

            • remotelove@lemmy.ca
              1·
              3 months ago

              No worries! I am generally very open about it. (Your comment was recognizable to me, actually.) There is a very specific non-malicious bluntness that comes with the condition, actually.

              But yeah, you have been practicing dealing with it your entire life. Treatment just helps a ton.

      • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.ca
        4·
        3 months ago

        I tell my young developers - the primary goal in software engineering is maintainability. Code reuse, encapsulation, abstraction, and myriad other concepts all contribute to ease of maintaining source code over the long term. Maintainability allows for easier, predictable feature addition and removal, with fewer changes, and by different people. You’re also a different person than the one you were months or years ago when it comes to software.

      • nutt_goblin@lemmy.world
        2·
        3 months ago

        I’m the same way. Chasing code changes through the codebase then fighting with an edit rebase stack trying to explode them into less-interlocked changes.

        It doesn’t always work, sometimes I am just committing a giant blob of changes at work on my project I near-solo maintain 💀

    • Jelloeater@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      I mean, Poetry is a lot better then Pip. The only issue I see is that they broke some CICD stuffs farther up the chain.

      • jjjalljs@ttrpg.network
        2·
        3 months ago

        It could be!

        But part of working as a professional on a team is communicating and achieving consensus. Just trying to make a change like that out of the blue is poor form.

        Also consider the opportunity cost: we had planned on getting XYZ done this week, and instead he spent a few hours on this and dragged a few people into a “do we want to change to poetry right now?” conversation

  • AnarchoSnowPlow@midwest.social
    21·
    3 months ago

    Last time somebody did this to me there were a lot of sit downs about how to properly chop up large scale code changes and why we don’t sit on our own branch for two months.

    “How long will this take to get in?”

    “Well, two weeks for me to initially review it, a week for you to address all the changes, then another week or so for me to re-review it… Then of course we have to merge in all the changes that have been happening in primary…”

    • BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world
      1·
      3 months ago

      Last time I got this PR I was like, “Okay, I’ll do my best, but you asked the guy that has like 30 mins a day to actually focus and look at someone else’s code AND yours isn’t the only PR I’ll have to look at this sprint. Have fun reminding me about this for the next week.”

  • tatterdemalion@programming.dev
    112·
    3 months ago

    This does seem like a potential issue if the PR is itself implementing more than one vertical slice of a feature. Then it could have been smaller and there might be wasted effort.

    If the patches are small and well-organized then this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It will take more than one day to review it, but it clearly took much more time to write it.

    • Throwaway@lemm.ee
      5·
      3 months ago

      True, but at the same time its very possible to go too small. A bunch of one line code reviews can really slow progress easily.

      • magic_lobster_party@kbin.run
        5·
        3 months ago

        Stuffing multiple tasks into one PR is often bad.

        • It’s harder to review. As a reviewer it’s difficult to know which code change is related to which task.
        • It’s harder to verify. Did you really test every change you made?
        • You might end up with a “hostage” situation. There might be a few code changes in the PR that looks good and is really wanted, but other code changes in the same PR of lower quality. As a reviewer, should you just let these lower quality code changes slide so you can bring in the code change you really want? Probably not, but you’re going to let it slide either way.
        • jjjalljs@ttrpg.network
          2·
          3 months ago

          You might end up with a “hostage” situation.

          Reminds me of a guy I used to work with.

          He’d have like a pretty normal PR to do something like change a field to be read only in some API. But then snuck into the pr there’d also be something like “change application to run locally different than prod for entirely selfish reasons” or “lower global coverage requirements” or “disable type checking in this whole folder”

          • magic_lobster_party@kbin.run
            2·
            3 months ago

            I also worked with a guy like that. Impossible to predict what he was going to do in his next PR. Always a nightmare to review. Also exhausting to argue with, so let some things slide because I was so done dealing with his bs.

            • jjjalljs@ttrpg.network
              2·
              3 months ago

              This guy was also difficult to argue with. He was always professional, which I guess is worth something.

              One time he tried to remove all the types from a bunch of code “because they were all going to change later.” I refused to allow this. We went back and forth in the comments for hours. I think eventually the lead or boss got involved. Thankfully people sided with me.

              His “later” project that was allegedly going to change all the things was rejected by the team. The code in question is still used and properly typed a year later.

      • tatterdemalion@programming.dev
        3·
        3 months ago

        Right but it’s pretty rare that a tiny PR actually accomplishes a valuable user story.

        So my point is just that lines of code is mostly irrelevant as long as it’s organized well and does no more than necessary to accomplish the agreed upon goal.

  • Olgratin_Magmatoe@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    3 months ago

    My first PR at my current job was about 130 files for the front-end, and about 70 for the backend. This hits close to home.

  • phoneymouse@lemmy.world
    4·
    3 months ago

    Love it when my coworkers reformat the code style, making it nigh impossible to understand what they actually changed, while greatly inflating their “contribution.”

    It also blows away the git blame, making it hard to know who actually changed that one critical line of business logic 3 years ago that you need to understand before trying to fix some obscure bug.

    I have one coworker who does this constantly and if you just looked at git blame, you’d think he wrote the entire code base himself.

    • ursakhiin@beehaw.org
      2·
      3 months ago

      Human made changes is likely not what caused this image to occur.

      111 files with that kind of change count is most likely a dependency update. But could also be that somebody screwed up a merge step somewhere.

      • shiftymccool@programming.dev
        2·
        3 months ago

        The only way I see that is a dependency update is if you’re versioning your node_modules or <insert-folder-here> which is generally a no-no

  • swordsmanluke@programming.dev
    3·
    3 months ago

    Net removal of 1500 LoC…

    I’m gonna make you break this up into multiple PRs before reviewing, but honestly, if your refactoring reduced the surface area by 20% I’m a happy man.