If you don’t already, use version control (git or otherwise) and try to write useful messages for yourself. 99% of the time, you won’t need them, but you’ll be thankful that 1% of the time. I’ve seen database engineers hack something together without version control and, honestly, they’d have looked far more professional if we could see recent changes when something goes wrong. It’s also great to be able to revert back to a known good state.

Also, consider writing unit tests to prove your code does what you think it does. This is sometimes more useful for code you’ll use over and over, but you might find it helpful in complicated sections where your understanding isn’t great. Does the function output what it should or not? Start from some trivial cases and go from there.

Lastly, what’s the nature of the code? As a developer, I have to live with my decisions for years (unless I switch jobs.) I need it to be maintainable and reusable. I also need to demonstrate this consideration to colleagues. That makes classes and modules extremely useful. If you’re frequently writing throwaway code for one-off analyses, those concepts might not be useful for you at all. I’d then focus more on correctness (tests) and efficiency. You might find your analyses can be performed far quicker if you have good knowledge about data structures and algorithms and apply them well. I’ve personally reworked code written by coworkers to be 10x more efficient with clever usage of data structures. It might be a better use of your time than learning abstractions we use for large, long-term applications.

I really liked how coupling is described as “knowing.” I find we talk about “does x need to know about y?” more than we do “is x overly coupled to y?” because the former is a relatable indicator of the latter.

I use a UK keyboard, | is pretty easy to access and $ is Shift+4.

I’m guessing you mean more exotic keyboards. I’ve used a Swedish keyboard while helping a friend and I had to ask where every key was. You probably just learn the combinations eventually.

I agree. I use Proton and I have exactly one service which supports GPG. It’s a cherry on top but it’s not all that useful.

The big thing is to use a trustworthy service that you pay for. It’s not bulletproof but at least the incentive is there to keep your email private and away from advertisers.

To be honest, I agree they should be able to be larger at times.

I had a lot of disagreements when I was on a new codebase, knew what I was doing and I was able to push a lot of code out each day.

The idea is to have them small, easily readable with a tight feedback loop. I argued that bootstrapping a project will have a lot of new code at once to lay the foundations and my communication with the team was enough feedback. If I split it up, each PR would have been an incomplete idea and would have garnered a bunch of unnecessary questions.

That said, I think it’s generally pretty easy to put out multiple PRs in a day, keeping them small and specific. As you say, half of the job is reading code and it’s nicer to give my coworkers a set of PRs broken down into bite sized pieces.

I’d be pulled up at my job for any PR exceeding a few hundred lines. I don’t even know what they’d do if I just dropped a 15000 line stinker.

Funny, that’s in line with the $1 a year WhatsApp was going to charge.

Sounds like just $5 will pay for me and 4 others, so that’s nice.